Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory. She works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she feels “very tired and exhausted,” and sometimes falls asleep standing...

As labor provisions in regional trade agreements proliferate, critics contend that they are used for protectionist purposes. Existing categories of labor clauses lead to inconsistent empirical results. We propose and apply a new typology for labor clauses to all WTO-notified regional trade...

What is the effect of more stringent labor standards on trade performance? Several recent papers have attempted to identify the partial effects of international labor standards on trade by using ILO labor standards ratifications as instruments in cross-sectional regressions. This paper...

I explore the relationship between economic growth and international labor standards in a panel of 121 countries from 1974 to 2004. A large literature has empirically tested the neoclassical growth model using cross-sectional or panel regressions. Here, I augment the growth model with labor...

How do labor standards develop in countries after international labor conventions are ratified? Previous studies suggest that despite high ratification rates, the protection of labor rights is not enhanced. Using panel data on both de jure and de facto labor conditions for 132 countries from...

This chapter deals with the question of whether labour standards are less relevant or more relevant for the new world of work which is vastly different from the old world of work when most labour standards were first established. The various rationales for labour standards are first outlined....

Various groups have been demanding that discussions of labor standards be included in all future trade negotiations. The press is full of stories of alleged exploitation of child labor and other employment abuses in developing countries and human rights groups have demanded that something be...

An increasing number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) include “labor clauses” that require or urge the signatory countries to commit to maintaining a certain level of labor standards. This paper, starting by classifying more than 200 currently effective RTAs depending on the nature and...

Various groups have been demanding that discussions of labor standards be included in all future trade negotiations. The press is full of stories of alleged exploitation of child labor and other employment abuses in developing countries and human rights groups have demanded that something be...