CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ECONOMICS OF INTERNATIONAL LABOR STANDARDS (Ws Studies in International Economics)

As global production has become dispersed worldwide, so have concerns for the plight of workers employed in the world factory. Standard economic intuitions prescribe sharp tradeoffs between the worker-level benefits that a job confers, and the number of such jobs that are ultimately made available. Such quality-quantity tradeoffs have taken center stage in the global debate on potential benefits and costs of legalizing and enforcing international labor standards. This volume organizes and presents a number of new developments in the economics of international labors standards. The first part of this volume explores a series of labor market institutions particularly in developing country labor markets so far unexplored in international labor standards debate. These include the presence of middlemen market power, the persistence of interlinked debt and labor market exploitations, and the origins of two-tiered labor markets. These studies unveil the determinants of workers' well-being and the associated justification for labor market policy interventions when institutions are lopsided favoring contractors, moneylender-cum-employers, and/or select workers blessed with "good" jobs. The second part explores the effectiveness of policy intervention by explicitly recognizing policy implementation challenges. These include coordination failure in the international context, imperfect enforcement and compliance of national labor regulations, and the limits of market-driven fair trade programs. In doing so, these studies shed light on the pitfalls of wholesale international labor standards prescriptions, and advocate instead in favor of case-by-case approach which duly recognize the specific ways in which the labor market deviate from standard assumptions, and the realities of policy implementation and enforcement difficulties.

Arnab K Basu is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2007. He received his PhD in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and his Master's and undergraduate degrees respectively from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and St. Xavier's College, University of Calcutta (both in India). He has previously held long-term visiting positions at Florida International University, Miami, Cornell Institute of Public Affairs, and the City University of Hong Kong. Basu is a recipient of the Theodore W Schultz Young Economist Prize (awarded every 3 years by the International Association of Agricultural Economists) and a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Nancy H Chau joined the faculty in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell in 1999. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a research fellow at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn.

Chau was recently awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and the first T W Schultz Award of the International Agricultural Economics Association. She is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, a senior fellow at the Center for Development Research, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA Bonn), and member of an expert panel for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Chau has published widely, in journals such as Economic Journal, Economics and Politics, Economica, European Economic Review, International Economic Review, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Public Economic Theory, and the World Bank Economic Review.