Research On Influences Of International Labor Standards On China Textile And Garment Export

Under the background of economic globalization, the problem of labor standards is becoming a hot issue in international communities, and whether or not involving it into WTO system has been intensely disputed between developed countries and developing countries. Judging from the current situation, it is impossible for concerning WTO agreements to absorb the labor standards in a short term, but it is moving towards multilateral trade areas from unilateral trade areas. Considering the tendency, this paper focuses on studying the relationships between labor standards and trade. And after analyzing the actuality of China labor standards, empirical method is used to study the impact of labor standards on textile and garment industry's export, in order to deal with the issue of labor standards better.Firstly, this paper reviews the history of labor standards, mainly analyzing the current situation of China labor standards. From this part, a great progress of them can been found both at national level and non-governmental level. Specially, with the development of Code of Conduct, the third-party certification which is represented by SA8000 has an increasingly influence on trade.Secondly, the article surveys international and domestic theoretical literatures on labor standards, making conclusion that there is no support of a positive correlation between labor standards and export in most cases.Thirdly, the article analyzes the level of China core labor standards from legal and reality view respectively. From the first point, other three areas are unable to meet requirements of core labor standards except for the child labor area. From the latter point, it is also disappointing and the right to Organize and Collective Bargaining is even in lower level. In addition, the article studies the labor standards of textile and garment industry, according to two indicators hourly wage and working hours per week, compared with developed and emerging countries there is a big gap between China and them. Then, based on the data from 1990 to 2006, the article makes a empirical study of the influences of labor standards on Chinese textile and garment export. Results show that in the field of core labor standards, child labor has a negative correlation with textile and garment export, the female labor force participation rate has a positive correlation with it, and the number of unions has no correlation. The results also verify multinational empirical studies and also demonstrate that it is unnecessary to worry too much about the impact of the rise in labor standards on China textile and garment export.