In many markets in developing countries, especially in remote areas, middlemen are thought to earn excessive profits. Non-profits come in to counter what is seen as middlemen's market power, and rich country consumers pay a "fair-trade" premium for products marketed by such non-profits. This...

The rati¯cation of ILO Labor Standards Conventions is a key explanatory variable in the empirical literature linking labor standards to economic performance. The assumption is that rati¯cation gives information on labor standards implemented in a country. This paper investigates the...

In many countries, the authorities turn a blind eye to minimum wage laws that they have themselves passed. But if they are not going to enforce a minimum wage, why have one? Or if a high minimum wage is not going to be enforced one hundred percent, why not have a lower one in the first place?...

This paper develops a theory of employment guarantees when labor markets are imperfect and when the credibility of government policy announcements could be in doubt. The basic feature of an EGS is that any individual who satisfies a set of specified criteria is guaranteed public employment at a...

The dominant perspective in discussions of labor and environmental standards and globalization is that of North-South competition and its impact on Northern standards. This paper presents an alternative perspective, that of South-South competition to export to the North, and its impact on...

This paper proposes a trade restrictiveness indicator that explicitly incorporates environmental externalities. The index employs directional distance functions and use indicators (i.e. differences rather than ratios) modified to account for and evaluate efficiency changes in the face of...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense...