The Economics of Human Rights

Elizabeth Wheaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351012973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Economics plays a key role in human rights issues as decision-makers weigh the incentives associated with choosing how to use scarce resources in the context of committing or escaping human rights violence. This textbook provides an introduction to the microeconomic analysis of human rights utilizing economics as a lens through which to examine social topics including capital punishment, violence against women, asylum seeking, terrorism, child abuse, genocide, and hate.

Whether analyzing the decisions made in capital punishment cases, the causes and consequences of genocide, or the impact of terrorist acts on domestic and international decision-making, the science of economics provides tools and a systematic method of analysis and policy recommendation. This key text presents a method for integrating the social sciences of economics and human rights to create new opportunities for the investigation of social issues. Within each chapter, readers gain a fundamental understanding of a specific human rights issue, the decision-makers and the decision-making process involved, and the benefits and costs leading to the decisions. Experts on each issue, drawn from a variety of fields, contribute to each chapter and present first-hand accounts and different perspectives on each issue. The detailed analyses and accounts provided also explore the potential incentives involved in the prevention and termination of human rights violations.

Aiming to further economic inquiry and enhance interdisciplinary research, this textbook serves as a multi-purpose guide for a range of readers. Students, researchers, and educators, as well as those working in organizations supporting victims of human rights violations and policy-makers facing human rights challenges, will find this book informative and engaging.

1 Economics of human rights

Contributor: Rick Halperin, Ph.D.

IT TAKES LITTLE time to open the news and read about the horrors going on around the world, some of which are too close for personal comfort. Many people put up a wall to protect themselves from these horrors, choosing to focus on protecting their own families and belongings. While one’s own comfort can crowd out some of the discomforts of the world, there are other people who seek positive change in the world and are willing to put time, energy, and resources toward creating that change.

Change by itself does little good if the circumstances surrounding the present realities are unknown or not understood. When coupled with knowledge from other fields, economics provides a way to analyze the decision-making processes at work in social situations. Economics can help when a social scientist wants to know the consequences of a county deciding to try a murder case as a capital case in which the outcome may be the death penalty; when an international nonprofit organization is concerned about the likelihood of genocide occurring in one of its target areas; when a politician wonders how violence against women affects the viability of laws and voting outcomes; when a citizen ponders how much of the news about “hate crimes” is accurate; when a traveler considers the incidence of terrorism in a specific area; or when human rights organizations are interested in how human rights violations occur during asylum seeking. Each of these events relates to the decision-makers themselves, the costs and benefits they face, and the outcomes of those decisions. This process is called cost-benefit analysis and is one of the foundations of economics.

Economics is the study of choice when dealing with scarcity. Social issues are prime places to study scarcity and the choices being made on those landscapes. This textbook is for those who want to 1) understand how economic applications can address social issues and 2) understand how economics can be applied to any topic. Economics is one way to analyze the choices being made in each area of human rights and to pinpoint positive or negative incentives that can be used in policy-making to affect those choices.

This chapter provides a pathway through the basic structure of the textbook. Each chapter will mirror this structure to provide the clearest understanding of the process of approaching a human rights topic through the lens of economics. Economics takes the approach of observation to create hypotheses, collecting data related to these hypotheses, analyzing this data, reporting outcomes as well as whether the hypotheses were proven true or false, or not proven, and recommending which variables could change the incentives that affect decision-makers. The study of human rights also begins with observations. When those observations include violations of the agreed-upon human rights of a culture, the recommendation is that policy be used to prevent the human rights violations from occurring. In this regard, the study of human rights is a study of policy that reduces and obviates violations. Economics can be beneficial to this study as it takes existing hypotheses of the causes of the human rights violations, recommends what data should be collected or how to use existing data, analyzes this data in relation to existing hypotheses, and recommends variables that could change the incentives. Economics provides a set of tools that can help to identify and change incentives.

Economic decisions play several different roles in the area of human rights, but mainly focus on cost–benefit decisions of potential human rights violators and victims, and society. The textbook is written for upper-level economics undergraduate students and students in other disciplines studying human rights issues. Its primary audience is anyone who wants to gain a perspective on how to analyze diverse topics using economic theory and models, econometric tools, case studies, and data. The textbook is not meant to cover all human rights topics nor all the economics theory that pertains to each human rights topic. Rather, it is an opportunity for students to learn new information and analyze data in order to make informed decisions and contribute to quality research.

█ Section 1: Introduction to the economics of human rights

Unit 1: General introduction to human rights

Human rights studies and economics are social sciences that study interactions within society. There are economic foundations and implications at the heart of each violation of human rights, but “human rights” is not in itself a field of economics. On the other side, an economist must gain an understanding of the specific human rights topic in order to have an accurate perspective about the types of decisions, costs, and benefits that exist within that area. Both fields are needed to understand the dynamics of the economic decisions underlying human rights violations.

The term “human rights” elicits a wide range of responses – from strong emotion to stoicism, from curiosity to apathy. The study of human rights spans years, geography, and ideology. Human rights groups address issues such as the death penalty, women’s rights, children’s rights, human rights related to poverty, prisoners, people at risk, national security, countering terrorism, torture, refugee and migrant rights, censorship and free speech, human rights related to business, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual (LGBT) rights, and human rights related to military, police, arms, and international justice. The most widely accepted definition comes from the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Unit 2: Economics perspective

Elizabeth Wheaton, Ph.D.

As the founder-CEO of the nonprofit consulting organization Equip the Saints and senior lecturer at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Beth Wheaton seeks ways to equip world changers. Her research, augmented by her multiple degrees in economics and international business, focuses on the economic decisions and incentives surrounding child labor, human trafficking, and human rights. As the lead author of this textbook, she had the pleasure of extending her work along with a team of subject experts.

If you are sitting in a room of 100 people, look around and imagine you are all under four years old. The World Bank reports that on average 42.5 out of 1,000 children worldwide die before the age of five, so 96 of the people around you in the room will therefore survive to five years old. The United Nations (U.N.) Children’s Fund estimates that 150 million children (an average of 24% in developing countries) are engaged in child labor, some of it in the worst forms of child labor such as sex trafficking. Economic theory and modeling can be used in the fight against human rights violations, in conjunction with international data collection, expertise in each topic area, government and non-government organizations on the front lines, and people around the world with the passion to change the world.

Across the world there are calls for social justice, whether it is the rescue of orphans or animals, the saving of habitat or culture, or the protection of women’s or children’s rights. Social justice – the administration of the body of work that makes up human rights in a way that provides all people with equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities – stems from human rights. Human rights is the codified body of work coming from the national and international agreements, laws, and protocols that represent the rights of all human beings. An educated study of the human rights behind each of the social justice movements is necessary to understand, and possibly change, the decision processes underlying each of the human rights violations.

Economics is the study of choice when dealing with scarcity and focuses on the decision-making process by examining the costs and benefits that lead to a choice by an individual or a group. While the heart of human rights is that all people should be treated equally and with dignity, economics focuses on efficiency or the allocation of resources in order to gain the best possible outcome for the most people. Despite this, economics interacts with human rights in a number of ways. For instance, violations of human rights do not seem rational, but someone is making the choices to commit those violations. It may be possible to discover incentives that can change that person’s choices by changing the costs and benefits of making that decision.

Analyses of social situations such as human rights violations point to the fact that the solutions are complex and require the abilities and resources of a diverse group of people. The protection of human rights is affected by scarcity, because if there were unlimited resources available – money, the time of experts in areas such as the creation of laws, law enforcement, dispute resolution, etc. – the human rights violations may be prevented. There are current examples of human rights violations which have gone unchecked due to the lack of resources. If murder could be prevented, capital punishment would not be needed. If adequate discovery systems could be created to handle childhood trauma, anger management, and other psychological issues, violence against women would not occur. Similar assumptions could be made in other human rights issues like asylum seeking, terrorism, genocide, and incidents fueled by hate. A scarcity of monetary and nonmonetary resources may lead to a setting in which the violation is possible.

While economics is not the only tool that can be used to analyze human rights, human rights advocates are calling for more interdisciplinary research and work to find solutions for the human rights issues that occur around the world. Economists trained to step into an unfamiliar field will have more career and life opportunities as well as more tools to change the world.

█ Section 2: Fundamentals of human rights

Correctly defining terms is essential for valid research. Inaccurately defined goals lead to irrelevant res...