Apocalypse Now, Prostitution Later
During my PhD, I got interested in the sex industry in Thailand and its origins. With Y. Zylberberg and W. N. Lekfuangfu, we wanted to test whether the development of the sex industry in Thailand was related to the U.S. military presence during the Vietnam War. At the peak of the Vietnam War, there were approximately 50,000 men stationed in Thailand, and it is estimated that around 700,000 U.S. servicemen visited Thailand bases between 1962 and 1976. Many authors report that it was common for troops to go to shanty towns of brothels surrounding U.S. bases. This practice was referred to as going to the "dogpatch."
In Brodeur et al. (2018), we combine historical records of U.S. military presence in Thailand and census estimates of the commercial sex industry to analyze the relationship between the presence of U.S. military bases and the size of the local sex industry in the early 1990s. We document that, in spite of the departure of U.S. servicemen in 1975, the sex industry has become even more concentrated around red-light districts near former U.S. bases. Comparing the surroundings of Thai military bases used by the U.S. army to districts close to unused Thai bases, we find that there are currently 5 times more commercial sex workers in districts near former U.S. bases. In other words, districts easily reachable by U.S. servicemen during the war have become red-light districts.
Another factor also contributed to the development of the sex industry: migration of young women to red-light districts. A crop price crisis hit Thailand during the 1980s. We show that while overall rural-urban migration did not increase during this period, the migration of young female workers did increase quite markedly. We provide evidence that the development of the sex industry is explained by the combination of the temporary demand shock (i.e. U.S. military presence) and by a high price elasticity of supply due to female migration from regions affected by the agricultural crisis. Our results suggest that the conjunction of these demand and supply shifts explains almost 50% of the variation in the number of sex workers across Thai districts at the peak of the sex industry in 1990.
Last, we analyze one consequence of the implied concentration of sex workers in few red-light districts: the outbreak of the HIV epidemics in these areas. Based on simple counterfactual exercises, we attribute about 1 percentage point of the HIV prevalence among young Thai males in 1991 (about 4.5%) to the abnormally high number of sex workers in provinces affected by past U.S. military presence. We then explore whether the high concentration of the sex industry lead to more or less HIV infections. On the one hand, we show that the clustering of sex workers, because of non-linearities in HIV propagation, induces high transmission rates and thus more infections. On the other hand, concentration may facilitate policy interventions with health checks for sex workers.
Our results have interesting policy implications. First, understanding the factors leading to the development of the sex industry may help to control its growth. A government may be willing to avoid disequilibria in male to female ratio which leads to the development of prostitution, or may want to subsidize female formal work in such instances. Moreover, we assess the importance of the sex industry and its characteristics in the HIV propagation. Our findings may inform the debate on the negative externalities of prostitution on health or female labor supply.
References
Brodeur et al., 2018. "War, Migration and the Origins of the Thai Sex Industry," Journal of the European Economic Association.