Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements and Workers’ Rights

The last decades have witnessed an increase in cooperations in trade, resulting in the plethora of trade agreements with provisions on workers’ rights. Many of these labour provisions aim to protect workers by stipulating acceptable minimum standards of working conditions and other labour rights. This study thus investigates the effectiveness of labour provisions in trade agreements using a new database of workers’ right collated in 2012 and 2015 on a sample of 165 countries. Treatment effect estimates are prone to misspecifications in either the outcome or treatment model. Thus, to obtain unbiased estimates, we employ the doubly robust inverse probability weighted regression adjustment method estimation technique which is robust to misspecification of either the outcome or the treatment models, and uses inverse probability weights to correct the estimator in cases the regression model is misspecified. We analyse how labour provisions impact overall workers’ rights and also differentiated between violation of workers’ right in practice, and workers’ right in law. Our results show that labour inclusive trade agreements significantly reduce the incidence of violation of workers’ rights in law” and in practice as well as overall workers’ rights violation. These results point out that global cooperations in the area of trade such as the one in which labour provisions are included in trade agreement are beneficial to reducing labour rights violation. Evidently, to achieve sustainable growth and step up the ladder of development, policy makers must strive to incorporate such provisions in trade agreements and other global cooperations when (re)negotiating trade agreements.