Assessing Trade–Labor Linkages: A Big Step Forward
| Author | Kimberly Ann Elliott |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12644 |
Assessing Trade–Labor Linkages: A Big Step
Forward
Kimberly Ann Elliott
Center for Global Development and George Washington University Institute for
International Economic Policy
We now have more than 25 years of experience with the
inclusion of labor provisions in preferential trade agree-
ments, going back even beyond the pathbreaking North
American Free Trade Agreement between the United States,
Canada and Mexico. Yet, to date, detailed information, sys-
tematically and consistently compiled, that documents key
features of, and differences in, these provisions across trade
agreements has been missing. That has now changed with
the new Labor Provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements
(LABPTA) dataset previewed in Global Policy in 2018.
The new database, developed by Damian Raess and Dora
Sari, includes 140 items relating to labor provisions in 487
preferential trade agreements (PTAs) involving 165 countries
over the period 1990–2015. These provisions are divided into
three categories, PTAs with no, hortatory only or ‘comprehen-
sive’labor provisions. For those PTAs that go beyond
hortatory language in the preamble or list of objectives, labor
provisions are coded according to the scope of the substan-
tive commitments, the degree to which these commitments
are legally binding obligations, whether and to what degree
they are enforceable, whether and how they promote
cooperation, and whether and how the agreement creates
institutions to oversee implementation of the agreement.
One quibble that I have with the paper is that calling provi-
sions that are more than hortatory ‘comprehensive’may con-
fuse readers. The authors’own data show that the breadth
and depth of labor provisions vary widely across PTAs. Nor is
it clear what “comprehensive”coverage of labor issues might
mean, which leads to my second quibble. In defining the uni-
verse of labor provisions that they include, the authors focus
on measures to protect or promote workers’rights or working
conditions and exclude provisions related to investment,
migrant worker rights or broader social protection issues, such
as social security or active labor market policies. This is
somewhat disappointing, as these are also important. It is also
fully understandable given the need to make this already an
enormous task tractable.
LABPTA allows scholars to tackle a range of questions
about the evolution and impacts of labor provisions in PTAs.
In the earlier Global Policy article, Raess and Sari explore pat-
terns in labor provisions across countries and over time,
including which countries are prone to negotiate them (no-
tably Canada, the European Union, and United States), how
enforceable they are (not very, most of the time), and the
degree to which countries rely on institutions to implement
them (more often in recent years). In another article, the
authors, along with Andreas Dur, use the dataset to explore
how key domestic constituencies influence the design of
labor provisions in PTAs.
1
Carrere, Olarreaga and Raess use LABPTA to tackle one of
the major debates about trade-labor linkages: Are labor pro-
visions protectionism in disguise, designed to reduce trade
pressures? To the contrary, the authors find that low-income
countries appear to benefit from the inclusion of labor pro-
visions in North-South trade agreements, especially those
that include measures to promote cooperation.
2
The other major question to which most people would
like an answer is, do labor provisions in trade agreements
make a difference in workers lives? And we still know rela-
tively little about that. LABPTA’s data on enforceability and
institutions gets us part of the way—PTAs that are hortatory,
or substantive but lacking in strong institutions and enforce-
ment mechanisms, are unlikely to have much impact on
worker rights. But neither does the mere presence of those
mechanisms guarantee improvements in worker rights. The
mechanisms have to be credible and countries have to be
willing to use them.
Right now it is difficult to even show a correlation between
labor provisions in PTAs and improvements in worker rights
because we have not had consistent, rigorous and detailed
data on changes over time in worker rights. But that is also
changing. Sari, along with David Kucera of the International
A Response to ‘Labor
Provisions in Trade Agreements (LABPTA):
Introducing a New Dataset’,
Damian Raess and Dora Sari*
*Raess, D. and Sari, D. (2018) ‘Labor Provisions in Trade Agreements
(LABPTA): Introducing a New Dataset’,
Global Policy,
9 (4), pp. 451-
466.
Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12644 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019 151
Response Article
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