Research On The Influence Of Labor Standards On Export Trade

Labor standards generally refer to the criterions and requirements of labor wages, labor condition, labor welfares and citizen's other rights. Under the background of economic globalization, labor standards get more and more important, governments and scholars across the world pay great attention to it. Originally, labor standards belong to a country's internal affairs, while with the development of economic globalization, importing countries especially these countries with higher labor standards begin to condiser that a country which doesn't comply with labor standards may gain some advantages in export trade. Consequently, they insist that WTO should bring labor standards into WTO agreements. On the other hand, developing countries oppose this proposition strongly. So it is necessary to do some research on the influences of labor standards on export trade.Based on the relevant theories of economics and international trade, starting from the content of labor standards, we analyze the influences of labor standards on export porformance from both theoretical and empirical aspects. First of all, we clarify the concept of labor standards and introduce the origin and development of labor standards problem. Then, this thesis makes a deeply theoretical analysis about the positive and negative influences of labor standards on export porformance, this analysis is based on the foundation of H-0 model and Maskus model. In the empirical analysis section, taking China for example, we research the relationship between labor standard and export from empirical resesrch aspect. Additionaly, with the expect of getting more reliable outcome, we summarize and compare three typical empirical models. Next, the issue of whether labor standards will be brought into WTO agreements is briefly discussed and SA8000 as an international standards which is being extensively used by multinational companies is introduced here as well. In the last section, we get the conclusion that low labor standards isn't the source of comparative advantages and the increase in export of developing countries has no direct relation to low labor standards,we also advance some suggestions about how to deal with the problem of labor standards.