TY  - JOUR
AU  - Anderson, Kym
TI  - Social Policy Dimensions of Economic Integration: Environmental and Labour Standards
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5702
PY  - 1996
Y2  - August 1996
DO  - 10.3386/w5702
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5702
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5702.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kym Anderson
University of Adelaide
School of Economics
Adelaide SA 5005
Australia
Tel: 6188303-4712
Fax: 6188223-1460
E-Mail: kym.anderson@adelaide.edu.au
M1  - published as Kym Anderson. "Social Policy Dimensions of Economic Integration: Environmental and Labor Standards," in Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger, editors, "Regionalism versus Multilateral Trade Arrangements" University of Chicago Press (1997)

AB  - Social policies, particularly environmental and labour issues, are not new to trade policy fora including the GATT. However, they are likely to have a more prominent role in trade policy discussions in the years ahead for the new World Trade Organization.  Many developing countries perceive the entwining of these social issues with trade policy as a threat to both their sovereignty and their economies, while significant groups in advanced economies consider it unfair, ecologically unsound, even immoral to trade with countries adopting much lower standards than theirs. This paper examines why these issues are becoming more prominent, whether the WTO is an appropriate forum to discuss them, and how they affect developing and other economies.  It concludes that (a) the direct effect on developing economies is likely to be small and for some may even be positive through improved terms of trade and/or compensatory transfer payments, but (b) there is an important indirect negative effect on them and other economies, namely, the potential erosion of the rules-based multilateral trading system that would result from an over-use of trade measures to pursue environmental or labour market objectives.
ER  -