Regional Trade Agreements with Labor Clauses: Effects on Labor Standards and Trade

Labor Clauses in Regional Trade Agreements and Effects on Labor Conditions: An Empirical Analysis

This paper attempts to perform an empirical analysis of the effects of “labor clauses” provided in bilateral or plurilateral trade agreements (or regional trade agreements: RTAs) on working conditions that laborers in the RTA signatory countries actually face, using macro-level data for a wide variety of countries. The paper first reexamines the labor-provision classification of 223 RTAs in for...

Trade AND Labor Standards

Regional Trade Agreements: Effects on Trade

positive or negative effects on trade depending on their design and implementation. Analysis in this chapter confirms that gains from a preferential trade agreement cannot be taken for granted; moreover, even in agreements with positive impacts on average incomes, not all members are assured of increases. The interesting policy question then is not whether RTAs are categorically good or bad, bu...

The trade structure effects of endogenous regional trade agreements

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of ...

Trade and Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Enforcement of Labor Regulations

Trade and Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Enforcement of Labor Regulations This paper revisits the question of how trade openness affects labor market outcomes in a developing country setting. We explore the fact that plants face varying degrees of exposure to global markets and to the enforcement of labor market regulations, and rely on Brazil’s currency crisis in 1999 as an exogenous so...