Laws, Costs, Norms, and Learning: Improving Working Conditions in Developing Countries

Drusilla Brown (), Rajeev Dehejia and Raymond Robertson

No 10025, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Working conditions in developing countries, such as those associated with the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, remain stubbornly low despite strict laws regulating hours, pay practices and occupational safety and health. Recent theoretic and empirical work suggests that norms and learning may play a significant role in determining conditions. We exploit the natural experiment of Cambodia's 15-year experience with the Better Factories Cambodia program to identify variation that reveals the relative contributions of laws, costs, norms, and learning in improving working conditions in Cambodia. The results suggest that policies that follow from the learning hypothesis may be the most effective at improving working conditions in the long run.

Keywords: working conditions; norms; personnel economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F53 F66 J8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-sea
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