The domestic battle over the design of non-trade issues in preferential trade agreements

ABSTRACT

Human rights, labour standards, and environmental protection standards are commonly linked to trade. Because these links come in different forms, the question arises: what accounts for such variation? An examination of the wide variety of non-trade issues (NTIs) in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) reveals that prominent explanations fall short of explaining this variation. I argue that domestic characteristics of trade partner countries trigger lobbying by interest groups and cause design changes. I hypothesize that strong import and wage pressure increases lobbying by social and environmental protection advocates. A large difference between member states regarding civil and political rights protection levels should trigger NGO activity, but only if at least one member complies at a very high level already. In order to test the argument, I rely on a novel dataset including newly coded data on NTIs design for 474 PTAs signed between 1990 and January 2016. The findings using multivariate regression analysis show that linking trade and social or environmental clauses is motivated by strategic and the inclusion of political rights by substantial interests. This study contributes to the literature on rational design of international institutions, legalization, and issue-linkage.

KEYWORDS:

• environmental protection
• human rights
• issue-linkage
• labour rights
• legalization
• non-governmental organizations
• preferential trade agreements
• rational design
• trade unions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Laura Andreea Baroni, Sarah Dingler, Andreas Du¨r, Corinna Kr¨ober, Gabriele Spilker, Lena Ramstetter, the anonymous referees, and the editors of Review of International Political Economy for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2016.1231130.

Notes

1. I will use non-trade issues to describe civil and political rights (CPRs), environmental protection (EP), and economic and social rights (ESRs) in trade agreements. Even though the term non-trade issues is imperfect, since strictly speaking environmental protection and economic and social rights are not unrelated to trade, it became widely accepted in the literature (Jones, 2002; Lim˜ao, 2007).Economic and social rights cover the right to work, rights at work, the right to education, the right to development, and the right to health. Civil and political rights entail human dignity, the right to political participation, the right to free movement, women's and children's rights, minority protection, and the rule of law. Environmental protection means to care for natural resources (water, soil, forest), to reduce waste and air pollution, and to protect wildlife and game.

2. I use strict and highly legalizated as synonyms.

3. The 474 included PTAs are listed in the Appendix.

4. Author's data assessment.

5. See designoftradeagreements.com.

6. The exceptions are additional protocols to a treaty that are signed at later points in time. In such a case, the additional protocol is registered as a separate agreement in the dataset. If protocols or side letters are signed in the same year as the main text, I assessed the design of the consolidated version.

7. Details on how I conducted these reliability checks can be found in the Appendix.

8. Table A2 gives a list of these 126 variables and shows which codings are covered by each variable.

9. In the robustness checks I use SO2 emission.

10. 0See epi.yale.edu.

11. For details on which treaties I control for, see the Appendix.

12. See data.worldbank.org.

13. Since I have a fairly short time span (1990 to January 2016), I decided against the dynamic latent variable model suggested by K¨onig et al. (2013). Since the sample size drops to 147 observations, I exclude this variable in the baseline model. Results are reported in the Appendix.

14. Further robustness checks are listed in the Appendix.

15. Due to space constraints, the regression tables for CPRs are located in the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Lechner

Lisa Lechner is a PhD fellow and researcher in International Politics at the University of Salzburg. Her research focus is on trade policy, issue-linkage, and international negotiations.