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Summary This paper investigates how foreign aid inflows moderate bilateral trade-based pressures on the exporting countries’ labor rights. Because aid provides additional resources to recipient governments, it reduces the importance aid-recipient governments attach to the preferences of their export partners. Consequently, aid inadvertently moderates the leverage exercised by importing countries on the governments of exporting, developing countries. Our analysis of a panel of 91 aid recipient countries for the period 1985–2002 lends support to the “revenue substitution” hypothesis. When aid levels are low, bilateral trade-based pressures are associated with improved labor rights. As aid levels rise, however, the effect loses significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effort, during the last decade, to develop a set of global standards and codes to govern international capital markets. I posit that, despite global capital market pressures, this effort should have limited success in low and middle-income countries. Drawing upon a historical institutionalist framework, I suggest that domestic political institutions, as well as interests, often will lead to the failure of governments to implement global codes and standards. After describing briefly the motivations for and substance of the standards and code project, I summarize trends in the national implementation of such standards. I then point to several instances of policy feedback, in which the existing domestic regulatory institutions in middle-income countries rendered the adoption of new international rules difficult, technically as well as politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]