The impact of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) on collective labor rights in developing countries

Ye, Fangjin

doi:10.1007/s11558-019-09367-9

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Labor rights data are from the Work R dataset (Barry et al, 2022), available for 1994–2010. Given the prevalence of decoupling in the labor rights literature—that is, upholding labor standards in law but failing to enforce them in practice—we follow analytic convention (i.e., Mosley and Uno 2007; Ye, 2020) by including two outcome variables, Labor Rights Practices ( de facto ) and Labor Rights Laws ( de jure ). Both are index variables that account for labor conditions in practice and in law, respectively.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the costs and challenges of protecting labor rights, decoupling is all too common. That is, states formally commit to protect labor rights-whether through the passage of relevant domestic laws or the ratification of labor rights treaties and conventions-but remain unable or unwilling to protect these rights in practice (Ye, 2020). This can be a politically expedient option; rather than directly confronting labor groups, states can undermine worker rights by not providing the necessary resources for their protection (Blanton et al, 2015).…”

Section: Resource Wealth and The Political Economy Of Labor Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resource Wealth: A “Curse” for Labor Rights?

Blanton

Peksen

2023

Comparative Political Studies

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Though a great deal of research has examined the economic and political consequences of natural resource wealth, its implications for labor remain empirically under-examined. In this article, we contend that resource abundance undermines labor rights due to the inelastic demand for resource-intensive products, which serves to insulate these states from internal and external pressures to protect these rights. In addition to this direct linkage, we posit that resource wealth indirectly undercuts labor rights through its adverse impact on civil society and bureaucratic capacity. Examining these linkages across 148 countries for the years 1994–2010, we find that resource wealth has a negative and significant impact on labor rights practices, though not on labor rights laws. Results from a causal mediation analysis show that resource wealth also undermines labor rights through its negative impact on labor organizations and bureaucratic capacity

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resource Wealth and The Political Economy Of Labor Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resource Wealth: A “Curse” for Labor Rights?

Blanton

Peksen

2023

Comparative Political Studies

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“…There are several ways in which a large-N qualitative database of TLA campaigns can connect labour scholarship with current debates in the social sciences. For instance, scholars continue to ask whether states (national governments) are capable of countering the "race to the bottom" in labour rights due to international capital mobility (Ye 2020;Rodrik 2012;Silver 2003;Lindblom 1982). For some, the erosion of welfare states in the global North and the disappearance or nonexistence of social protections in the global South are clear signs of states' complicity in the treatment of workers as mere commodities.…”

Section: Tla Data In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project: Methods, Problems, and Progress

Brookes¹

2022

Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik

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Transnational labour alliance (TLA) campaigns have been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry for more than two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about the overall characteristics of TLA campaigns in general, in part because the full population of cases remains unknown. This article begins to fill this lacuna by introducing the Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project, an archive of primary and secondary documents and researcher-assembled case summaries created by the author over six years, with the help of over 100 undergraduate research assistants. This article explains the methodology of the project as well as several important limitations of the database in its current state. Additionally, this article provides a theoretical overview of key themes relevant to the analysis of TLAs and an empirical overview of broad trends in TLA campaigns. It makes a first step towards developing a typology of TLAs and argues that TLAs vary across at least five key dimensions: (1) who the main actors are; (2) what workers want; (3) where the campaign occurs; (4) why the TLA forms in the first place; and (5) how tactics are deployed.

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“…Foreign investors have now initiated more than 1000 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases against over 100 states under investment treaties, 1 and there is an ongoing discussion on whether the ISDS system allows too many frivolous claims to be made by investors (Johns et al, 2020). Recent research also indicate that ISDS cases often lead to regulatory chill in respondent states (Moehlecke, 2020;Berge and Berger, 2021) and that BITs may contribute to locking in low labor standards in developing countries (Ye, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic capacity and preference attainment in international economic negotiations

Berge

Stiansen

2022

Rev Int Organ

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What determines states’ ability to influence the contents of international institutions? Extant scholarship on international economic negotiations highlights the importance of political and economic capacity in negotiations. In this article, we argue that another structural source of negotiating power has been overlooked: bureaucratic capacity. Building on in-depth interviews with a large sample of international economic negotiators, we develop a theory of how differences in bureaucratic capacity can give states advantages in bilateral negotiations. We test our theory on a dataset of bilateral investment treaties. To measure preference attainment, we combine a unique repository of states’ public negotiating mandates called model treaties and the texts of finalized investment treaties to compute the verbatim distances between states’ stated preferences and the treaties they negotiate. We then show that states with greater bureaucratic capacity than their counterparts tend to achieve higher preference attainment in investment treaty negotiations. Our results have important implications for scholarship on international negotiations and for policy-makers engaged in investment policy reform.

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The impact of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) on collective labor rights in developing countries

Cited by 11 publications

References 65 publications

Resource Wealth: A “Curse” for Labor Rights?

Resource Wealth: A “Curse” for Labor Rights?

The Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project: Methods, Problems, and Progress

Bureaucratic capacity and preference attainment in international economic negotiations

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