How Important Are Labor/Environmental Standards in Trade Agreements?

As noted many times on this blog, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been making a big deal of the absence of enforceable labor/environmental standards in certain trade agreements, such as NAFTA.  But how important would these really be?  Dan Drezner gives the following answer:

Repeat after me: attaching labor and environmental standards to trade agreements will have no appeciable effect on trade flows. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.

I'm sympathetic to that view, with one caveat:  Demanding that labor and environmental provisions be included could scuttle some trade deals, and that would have an impact on trade flows.

Comments

[Kimberlee Weatherall]

Demanding labor and environmental provisions will have other costs beyond scuppered trade deals. Based on practice in other areas, USTR is not likely to adopt a nuanced approach to the labor and environmental standards in trading partners, or spend the time to work out how their domestic laws work. The result is rules that don't work and an approach that, by showing US trade negotiators to be ignorant and high-handed in their dealings with other countries and their legal systems, feeds Anti-Americanism. Burrell and I showed that in a recent paper on the Australian IP provisions - called 'Exporting Controversy' - it's on SSRN.