International Labour and Environmental Standards Agreements: Is This Fair Trade?
Labour and environmental standards agreements are two contentious proposals that have contributed to the failure of the WTO to launch a new round of trade liberalisation discussions and have prevented the US President from obtaining fast-track negotiating authority. Proponents of the agreements have been able to win substantial political support by arguing that standardised rules on labour practices and environmental regulations is the only way to assure that international trade remains fair. Although there are widespread demands for 'fair trade,' there remains a lack of understanding as to what fairness means exactly. Recently, a comprehensive catalogue of fairness principles was presented by Suranovic (2000). This paper will analyse the proposals for labour and environmental standards with respect to these fairness principles in order to characterise how fairness is used by supporters of these policies. The paper will also show that by using different fairness principles, opponents of these policies can argue that these same policies are unfair. The fact that reasonable notions of fairness can be applied by both opponents and proponents of these agreements highlights difficulties with fairness, per se, as a useful guide to policy. The paper uses this contentious issue to highlight the conceptual difficulties of proposals for fair trade. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 25 (2002)
Issue (Month): 2 (02)
|Contact details of provider:|| Web page: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0378-5920|
|Order Information:||Web: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/subs.asp?ref=0378-5920|
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:worlde:v:25:y:2002:i:2:p:231-245. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing)or (Christopher F. Baum)
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.