The EU, China, trade dependence and human rights

Abstract

This article looks at the linkages between export to the European Union (EU), export to china and human rights policies. The article argues that countries that export to the EU at high rates are more likely to converge towards its policies than countries that don’t export to the EU. The article also argues that the rise of China as a significant economic actor does not undermine this process. The article tests these arguments by analysing the links between human rights protection in the EU and in China, and export to the EU and to China, on the one hand, and human rights protection in all the countries for which there are data, on the other. The results indicate that countries’ human rights policies are positively associated with the EU’s human rights policies and this association is conditioned by countries’ levels of export to the EU. The results further indicate that export to China does not undermine this pattern. The article draws conceptual and policy implications.

Notes on Contributor

Sara Kahn Nisser is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Open University of Israel. She is author of articles published in leading journal as well as the first Hebrew textbook on the European Union. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Although no new data are used in the analysis, the data are available from the author upon request.

2 Hansen statistics could not be calculated for the fixed effects model because for some countries the number of observations is insufficient. Therefore, they were obtained with no unit effect. All other specifications remained identical. The main results hold in that specification.

3 The extraordinarily high coefficient should not cause alarm, since the interaction term is itself involved in a three-way interaction; it represents the change in the DV when there is a one-unit increase in the mean HR score in the EU combined with joining the ENP and when the volume of trade with the EU is set to zero (Kam and Franzese 2007).

4 Since these variables are included in the interaction terms, their coefficients represent the change in the outcome variable associated with a one-unit increase in each constituent term when the other terms involved in the interaction are set to zero.

5 The full results are available from the author.