Do preferential trade agreements including labor provisions reduce collective labor rights violations?

The paper examines how the design of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) regarding labor provisions influences state compliance with collective labor rights. We hypothesize that PTAs combining either highly enforceable or strongly promotional features with highly specific references to labor provisions are more effective in increasing compliance with labor rights than PTAs without these characteristics. Using the most comprehensive available dataset on PTAs (DESTA), the paper provides one of the most fine-grained coding of labor provisions in trade agreements and matches this novel data with Kucera and Sari's new trade union rights indicator which provides detailed qualitative and quantitative data on country-level compliance in law and in practice for about 180 countries for four recent data points (2000, 2005, 2009 and 2012). As such the paper greatly contributes to the currently existing, but mainly cross sectional analyses. The paper tackles the questions whether existing commitments to labor provisions in PTAs lead to the reduction of both de jure and de facto violations or only de jure violations and whether certain types of violations reduce the probability of other types of violations. The paper also provides a detailed comparative analysis in the design of labor provisions in PTAs signed by the different key players (e.g. EU, US, Canada and EFTA) and the difference in their impact on collective labor rights.