This paper study the issue of institutional enforcement of regulations by focusing on labor-market policies and their potential link to economic performance. It test the different impacts of enforceable and non-enforceable labor regulations by proxying non-enforceable labor rigidity measures using data on conventions from the International Labor Organization (ILO). It has been argued that non-enforceable conventions -that is, those that exist on paper and are simply de jure regulations -appear to be more distortionary and tend to be the least enforced in practice (Squire and Suthiwart-Narueput, 1997). According to Freeman (1993), these conventions reflect the ideal regulatory framework from an institutionalist perspective and cover a variety of labor market issues, from child labor to placement agencies. Whereas in theory, a country's ratification of ILO conventions gives the country legal status and thus supersedes domestic regulations relating to those issues, in practice the degree of labor-market rigidity depends on how the conventions are enforced. It is the outcome of the regulations that matters, rather than their number.
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Paper provided by Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department in its series RES Working Papers with number
1022.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Juan Botero & Simeon Djankov & Rafael Porta & Florencio C. Lopez-De-Silanes, 2004.
"The Regulation of Labor,"
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
MIT Press, vol. 119(4), pages 1339-1382, November.
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Simeon Djankov & Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer & Juan Botero, 2003.
"The Regulation of Labor,"
NBER Working Papers
9756, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)