A few days ago I posted on my forthcoming paper with Josh Hall on international labor standards and economic development in the Journal of Labor Research. Our analysis of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa found that not a single nation in this region of the developing world has satisfied the development threshold the highly developed world satisfied when it when it introduced various labor standards. This is true for every major labor standard in place in the U.S. The average Sub-Saharan country is between 100 and 300 years from reaching this threshold, depending upon the standard one considers.
Josh and I have just added some additional work in this paper, considering the same question for so-called "sweatshop-intensive" developing countries--developing nations believed to be home to the largest concentrations of child sweatshops on the globe. The results of our study confirm our findings for Sub-Saharan Africa: increased labor standards for these nations are also highly premature.The average sweatshop-intensive country is between 35 and 100 years from the development-appropriate threshold for various labor standards.
Of particular interest for these countries are labor standards prohibiting child labor. We find the average sweatshop-intensive country is 35 years from satisfying the threshold for this standard. Only one such country in this sample has currently satisfied the threshold--Costa Rica. The others are between 9 (Brazil) and more than 1000 (Honduras) years from doing so.
You can access these findings through the new version of the paper available here. It may take a minute to load, as the new tables are quite large.
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