U.S. Free Trade Agreements and Enforcement of Labor Law in Latin America

Sabina Dewan and Lucas Ronconi

No 6724, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This paper analyzes whether Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed between the United States and Latin American countries during the last decade produced higher enforcement of labor regulations. The paper computes before-after estimates of the effect of FTAs on labor inspections and exploits variation across countries using non-signers as a comparison group. The empirical strategy benefits from the fact that about half of Latin American countries have signed a trade agreement with the United States. Difference-in-differences estimates suggest that signing an FTA produced a 20 percent increase in the number of labor inspectors and a 60 percent increase in the number of inspections. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), however, does not appear to have the same positive impacts on Mexico. The paper concludes with a discussion of these results.

Keywords: Free trade agreements; Labor inspections; Labor law; Labor inspectors; Latin America; Labor regulations; Trade; Enforcement; Labor; Labor provisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F11 K31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... in-Latin-America.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: U.S. Free Trade Agreements and Enforcement of Labor Law in Latin America (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:6724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().