Suchergebnisse

The last decades have witnessed an increase in cooperations in trade, resulting in the plethora of trade agreements with provisions on workers' rights. Many of these labour provisions aim to protect workers by stipulating acceptable minimum standards of working conditions and other labour rights. This study thus investigates the effectiveness of labour provisions in trade agreements using a new database of workers' right collated in 2012 and 2015 on a sample of 165 countries. Treatment effect estimates are prone to misspecifications in either the outcome or treatment model. Thus, to obtain unbiased estimates, we employ the doubly robust inverse probability weighted regression adjustment method estimation technique which is robust to misspecification of either the outcome or the treatment models, and uses inverse probability weights to correct the estimator in cases the regression model is misspecified. We analyse how labour provisions impact overall workers' rights and also differentiated between violation of workers' right in practice, and workers' right in law. Our results show that labour inclusive trade agreements significantly reduce the incidence of violation of workers' rights in law" and in practice as well as overall workers' rights violation. These results point out that global cooperations in the area of trade such as the one in which labour provisions are included in trade agreement are beneficial to reducing labour rights violation. Evidently, to achieve sustainable growth and step up the ladder of development, policy makers must strive to incorporate such provisions in trade agreements and other global cooperations when (re)negotiating trade agreements.

In some important multiplayer situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can
choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision by a
group with fixed membership, playing over a finite number of periods, to choose between a "tipping"
game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players
contribute, and a prisoners' dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners' dilemma, the
first best outcome is attainable, but cannot be sustained as a Nash equilibrium. In the tipping game,
only a second best outcome may be attainable, but there exists a Nash equilibrium that is strictly
preferred to the one in the prisoners' dilemma. We show that many groups persistently choose the
prisoners' dilemma despite its strategic disadvantage, and that the groups that eventually choose
the tipping game do better than the ones that stick with the prisoners' dilemma.


The work was financially supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the ERC Starting Grant "Human Cooperation to Protect the Global Commons" (HUCO, Project number: 636746).

A novelty of the new Paris Agreement is the inclusion of a process for assessment and review of countries' nationally determined pledges and contributions. The intent is to reveal whether similar countries are making comparable pledges, whether the totality of such pledges will achieve the global goal, and whether, over the coming years, the contributions actually made by countries will equal or exceed their pledges. The intent is also to provide an opportunity for countries to express their approval, or disapproval, of the pledges and contributions made by individual countries. Here we report the results of a lab experiment on the effects of such a process in a game in which players choose a group target, declare their individual pledges, and then make voluntary contributions to supply a public good. Our results show that a review process is more likely to affect targets and pledges than actual contributions. Even when a review process increases average contributions, the effect is relatively small. As the window for achieving the 2 °C goal will close soon, our results suggest that, rather than merely implement the Paris Agreement, negotiators should begin now to develop complementary approaches to limiting emissions, including the adoption of agreements that are designed differently than the one adopted in Paris.