NBER Publications by Richard Staiger

How should the issue of domestic labor standards be handled in the GATT/ WTO? This question is part of a broader debate over the appropriate scope of international economic institutions such as the GATT, where member-countries are considering proposals for a new round of n3 negotiations that would move beyond GATT's focus on trade barriers and cover domestic' issues such as labor and environmental standards and regulatory reform which have traditionally been treated with benign neglect' within GATT. Such proposals encroach on traditional limits of national sovereignty, and they raise fundamental challenges to the existing structure of international economics relations among sovereign states. In this paper we consider several approaches to the treatment of domestic labor standards with...