Publications by Author: Michael Hiscox

In recent years, concerns about the impact of trade and investment on human rights and labor standards in developing nations have played an increasingly important role in political debates about globalization in Europe and the United States. In particular, labor unions, human rights groups, and other NGOs have raised alarms about "sweatshops" in developing nations that produce items for export (typically sewn or woven textile products) and are characterized by low wages, long working hours, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, child labor, and prohibitions against organization among workers. Many people fear that globalization has contributed to the spread of sweatshop production in developing countries as they compete to establish new export sectors and attract investment from footloose multinational firms (see Rodrik 1996; Klein 2000). The most adamant critics of globalization argue that this is part of a general "race to the bottom" in social and environmental standards in developing countries. These types of concerns have contributed to what appears to be a significant and growing political backlash against globalization in many western nations, mobilizing local activist groups and transnational NGOs and stirring uneasiness among voters about future trade agreements.

A majority of surveyed consumers say they would be willing to pay extra for products made under good working conditions rather than in sweatshops. But as yet there is no clear evidence that enough consumers would actually behave in this fashion, and pay a high enough premium, to make social product labeling profitable for firms. We provide new evidence on consumer behavior from experiments conducted in a major retail store in New York City in 2005. Sales rose for items labeled as being made under good labor standards, and demand for the labeled products actually rose with price increases of 10-20% above pre-test (unlabeled) levels. If the results hold more generally, there is a strong latent consumer demand for labor standards that many more retailers and producers could satisfy profitably by switching to certified and labeled goods.

We examine new survey data on attitudes toward international trade showing that women are significantly less likely than men to support increasing trade with foreign nations. This gender gap remains large even when controlling for a broad range of socio-economic characteristics among survey respondents, including occupational, skill, and industry-of-employment differences that feature in standard political-economy models of individuals’ trade policy preferences. Measures of the particular labor-market risks and costs associated with maternity do not appear to be related at all to the gender gap in trade preferences. We also do not find any strong evidence that gender differences in non-material values or along ideological dimensions have any affect on attitudes toward trade. The data do clearly reveal that the gender gap exists only among college-educated respondents and is larger among older cohorts. We argue that differences in educational experience—specifically, exposure to economic ideas at the college level—appear to be most plausible explanation for gender differences in attitudes toward trade. The findings suggest the possibilities of a renewed theoretical and empirical focus on the political roles played by ideas, not just among policymakers but also among the broader electorate. In practical terms, there are also implications for trade policy outcomes in different contexts and for how debates over globalization contribute to broader gender divisions in politics.

We derive a general, cross-national measure of trade policy orientations by using fixed country-year effects in a gravity model estimated with data on bilateral trade flows across 82 nations between 1960 and 1992. The approach provides an attractive alternative to existing methods for estimating general levels of trade restrictions for a wide array of nations over a substantial period of time. Existing indicators are either gravely biased or demand immense amounts of detailed data (or both). Our measure is theoretically grounded, easy to calculate with available data, consistent with the accepted contrasts drawn between notoriously closed and open economies in different periods, and it moves closely in line with well-documented policy reforms made recently in a variety of nations. At the same time the measure differs markedly from the most commonly used indexes of trade policy in a variety of important ways and cases, suggesting, for example, that those indexes dramatically overstate the degree of change in U.S. trade policy over the last three decades and the differences between U.S. and Japanese policy openness. Use of the new measure may thus have an important impact on results in several key fields of research—including studies of the effects of trade openness on growth and income inequality, and analyses of the politics of protectionism.