Do labor rights help to protect human rights? An empirical exploration

ABSTRACT

We investigate the impact of de jure protection of labour rights on the de facto security of human rights in an unbalanced panel of 60 developing economies considered over the period 1981–2011. With the exception of the right to industrial action and the regulation of dismissal procedures which exhibit negative impacts, we find that all other aspects of labour rights significantly improve state protection of human rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour Rights
• human Rights
• institutions
• labour Law

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J83
• P48

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The only alternative is the latent measure of Schnakenberg and Fariss (2014). Unfortunately, the variables used to construct it includes an index of labour rights which makes it unsuitable for our purpose.

² See Chitrakarn, Chatjuthamard, and Jiraporn (2013) as a study using a lagged value of the endogenous variable as instrument in 2SLS estimation.

³ The results are robust to other period durations. These will be provided on request.