Thank you for writing this! This is a framing I haven’t heard before, and I’m glad to have had the chance to read it.
The thesis of this post appears to be that there are overlooked opportunities in general policy advocacy that could have high leverage in GHD compared to more direct interventions, and that we should pursue them. I like this thesis directionally, but I have a few concerns.
My first is about Nunn’s argument that “since the initiation of antidumping duties requires significant legal capacity, these are typically initiated by wealthier countries and are often against less-developed countries.” Could another explanation be that there are higher rates of dumping in developing countries, potentially due to differences in domestic enforcement capacity or incentives? Some literature suggests that developing countries are generally under less scrutiny for compliance with international trade policy (https://www.chadpbown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Bown-Hoekman-JWT-2008.pdf), which leads me to doubt that antidumping duties are applied in a way that systematically disadvantages developing countries.
I also have a concern about the claims you make about the importance of consumer power as a lever for improving international labor standards. In the sweatshop example, if higher wages did not come at the expense of less production or fewer jobs, then the change seems clearly good. However, the 400% increase in minimum wages appears to be nominal, since it looks like real minimum wage in Indonesia rose only about 50% from 2000 to 2010 (or 200% from 1990 to 2012) (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Minimum-Wage-Growth-from-1990-2012-Note-Monthly-nominal-and-real-minimum-wages_fig1_282966999).
In the coffee example, you state that “recent evidence by Dragusanu and Nunn (2018) finds that consumer purchases of fair trade-certified coffee result in increased incomes of FT-certified coffee farmers in Costa Rica.” But the more important question is about incomes across the whole coffee farmer sector (and the laborers those farmers employ), and I don’t know if changes to those groups necessarily followed from changes to the incomes of FT-certified farmers.
Based on the quotes you include, I also share the worry that Nunn’s arguments sometimes risk overemphasizing harms from Western policy. When talking about things like “biased” trade policy, I think it’s pretty important to make clear fact-value distinctions, and I worry that Nunn blurs that line.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that “global aid advocacy is not a substitute for advocacy into good policy by the West,” and I think a more constructive way for it to be framed is as an additional set of (potentially overlooked) items in the arsenal of GHD policy advocates. That said, I have a central concern about whether these generally good policy efforts in developed nations are actually neglected enough to be good candidates for high-value advocacy. As David T noted in another comment, if existing actors already lobby heavily for them, additional EA efforts could have a relatively small marginal impact.
Thank you again for writing this post. While my comment was mostly a criticism, I appreciate what you brought into public discussion on the EA Forum with this post, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read and comment on it.
Thank you for writing this! This is a framing I haven’t heard before, and I’m glad to have had the chance to read it.
The thesis of this post appears to be that there are overlooked opportunities in general policy advocacy that could have high leverage in GHD compared to more direct interventions, and that we should pursue them. I like this thesis directionally, but I have a few concerns.
My first is about Nunn’s argument that “since the initiation of antidumping duties requires significant legal capacity, these are typically initiated by wealthier countries and are often against less-developed countries.” Could another explanation be that there are higher rates of dumping in developing countries, potentially due to differences in domestic enforcement capacity or incentives? Some literature suggests that developing countries are generally under less scrutiny for compliance with international trade policy (https://www.chadpbown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Bown-Hoekman-JWT-2008.pdf), which leads me to doubt that antidumping duties are applied in a way that systematically disadvantages developing countries.
I also have a concern about the claims you make about the importance of consumer power as a lever for improving international labor standards. In the sweatshop example, if higher wages did not come at the expense of less production or fewer jobs, then the change seems clearly good. However, the 400% increase in minimum wages appears to be nominal, since it looks like real minimum wage in Indonesia rose only about 50% from 2000 to 2010 (or 200% from 1990 to 2012) (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Minimum-Wage-Growth-from-1990-2012-Note-Monthly-nominal-and-real-minimum-wages_fig1_282966999).
In the coffee example, you state that “recent evidence by Dragusanu and Nunn (2018) finds that consumer purchases of fair trade-certified coffee result in increased incomes of FT-certified coffee farmers in Costa Rica.” But the more important question is about incomes across the whole coffee farmer sector (and the laborers those farmers employ), and I don’t know if changes to those groups necessarily followed from changes to the incomes of FT-certified farmers.
Based on the quotes you include, I also share the worry that Nunn’s arguments sometimes risk overemphasizing harms from Western policy. When talking about things like “biased” trade policy, I think it’s pretty important to make clear fact-value distinctions, and I worry that Nunn blurs that line.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that “global aid advocacy is not a substitute for advocacy into good policy by the West,” and I think a more constructive way for it to be framed is as an additional set of (potentially overlooked) items in the arsenal of GHD policy advocates. That said, I have a central concern about whether these generally good policy efforts in developed nations are actually neglected enough to be good candidates for high-value advocacy. As David T noted in another comment, if existing actors already lobby heavily for them, additional EA efforts could have a relatively small marginal impact.
Thank you again for writing this post. While my comment was mostly a criticism, I appreciate what you brought into public discussion on the EA Forum with this post, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read and comment on it.