Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday … language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare … distinctions that common usage of the term exploitation allows. I resolve this conflict by introducing a welfare function with …

. Three main new axioms, called Labour Exploitation in Subsistence Economies, Relational Exploitation, and Feasibility of Non-Exploitation … developed, which allows an explicit analysis of the core positive and normative intuitions behind the concept of exploitation …, are presented and it is proved that they uniquely characterise a definition of exploitation conceptually related to the so …