Where climate governance meets trafficking risk: Structural drivers of labour market pressure across a global panel, 2000–2023

Abstract

This study asks one question. Which structural conditions determine where governance-activated transition episodes, meaning country-years in which climate adaptive capacity is improving while labour market pressure on trafficking-affected populations remains elevated, concentrate across the global income distribution? Using data on 192 countries from 2000 to 2023, we build the Job and Trafficking Pressure Index (JTPI) to detect these episodes and test what structural conditions predict where they concentrate, using several statistical approaches that check the pattern from different angles. Countries with rising climate governance capacity are consistently more likely to show these transition episodes than countries without it, a result that holds across every method we use and confirms that JTPI is capturing a real and meaningful pattern rather than statistical noise. This pattern is strongest and most reliable in Upper-Middle Income economies, while the poorest countries lack sufficient data on climate readiness and labour markets to support firm conclusions. When we ask which countries experience this pattern most intensely, three features stand out. Larger populations, greater openness to trade, and higher rates of urbanisation are the strongest predictors, pointing to a specific mechanism. Climate investment tends to create new formal jobs in cities and trade sectors, and it is in these growing urban and trade-dependent economies that trafficking-affected workers appear to be drawn into the formal labour market in the largest numbers. They answer the question posed at the outset. Governance-activated transition episodes concentrate in populous, trade-open, urbanising economies rather than uniformly across the income distribution. This gives national adaptation plans, climate finance conditionality frameworks, and anti-trafficking governance bodies a specific structural target rather than a general policy aspiration.