Why International Agreements Reduce Cross-Border Adoptions

Why Study International Adoption?

This article by Asif Efrat, David Leblang, Steven Liao, and Sonal S. Pandya asks what shapes flows of children across national borders. The authors frame international adoption as a form of transnational, non-market exchange that is sensitive to transaction costs, legal certainty, and ties between sending and receiving countries. Understanding these forces matters for migration policy, international law, and the political economy of cross-border family formation.

How the Authors Analyze the Question

The authors assemble dyadic panel data on adoption flows between country pairs for 1991–2010 and model adoption incidence and counts using hurdle models designed to handle many zero flows. Their predictors include a sending country’s regulatory quality, the presence of colonial or migration links within the dyad, and whether an international agreement intended to ensure adoption integrity applies to the pair. The design isolates both sending-country characteristics and dyad-level ties that plausibly affect prospective parents’ costs and certainty.

Key Findings

• An international agreement intended to safeguard adoption integrity is associated with lower rates of foreign adoptions; the authors interpret this as an effect of higher transaction costs associated with the agreement.
• Higher regulatory quality in sending countries is associated with increased international adoptions, consistent with parents’ preference for predictable, low-risk processes.
• Colonial ties or prior migration links between sending and receiving countries increase the likelihood of adoption within a dyad, suggesting that social and historical connections reduce frictions.

These results hold in the authors’ hurdle-model framework that separates the decision to seek an international adoption from the number of adoptions once that barrier is passed.

Why This Matters for Policy and Scholarship

The study shows that private international law and transnational transaction costs shape who can adopt across borders. By highlighting how legal rules and bilateral ties alter practical barriers, the findings expand political economy perspectives on migration and underscore the unintended trade-offs of agreements designed to protect vulnerable children. Policymakers weighing safeguards against illicit practices should consider how compliance costs may reduce lawful adoptions and how regulatory quality and historical ties can mitigate those effects.