>It would appear from reports and articles appearing in Indian press that the
>quota system is meant to protect textile industry in the developed
>capitalism. Thus, quotas are industry specific.
Still there is the question of the determinants of the different sizes of the quotas allocated to various countries in these specific countries--I thought that was this article you downloaded was about, no? Why is Cambodia's quota in garments small while, say, Indonesia's big (perhaps even after correcting for the relative sizes of the countries)?
At any rate, how the world trading system really works--with its quotas, anti dumping laws, multilateral and bilateral deals, intra firm trading by oligopolistic transnational corporations, regional trading pacts--seems quite complex. It surely is nothing close to free trade or an integrated world market.
Even the GATT/WTO tarriff reduction efforts have been coupled with a surge in aribtrarily applied anti dumping measures, vitiating a real movement to free trade. It seems that all we are taught is the Ricardian defense of free trade based on comparative advantage which only holds on the basis of several arbitrary assumptions (see Michael Hudson, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt for a critique). Yet, the world trading system as it is is bewilderingly complex.
>I am not sure if low wages by themselves are pertinent to the debate about
>labour standards. I think it's about low wage ratesdue to prison labour,
>slave
>labour, child labour, lack of collective bargaining rights, discrimination
>at work
>place etc.,which confer an advantage unacceptable to contemporary
>capitalism.
Again, in the developed countries protection is not only being fought for in the idiom of anti dumping, anti predatory pricing theories (are the latter actually credible?). the fight now is over the advancement of this kind of social protection. The problems include at least:
*arbitrary application of quotas on certain third world countries
*hypocritical applications since the developed countries have not realised such reforms despite their much higher state of development
*given much higher verticially integrated labor coefficients, third world captialists may find it impossible to compete on a basis other than wage repression; that's simply the real world dilemma. And to ban such imports--as in the case of the Harkin Bill, see latest Journal of Economic Issues for a study of the effect on Bangladeshi children-- would have specific detrimental effects in terms of employment, effective demand, hard currency shortages on the penalized countries that need to be considered honestly--something Faux, Palley and others won't do.
*continued exaggeration based on misuderstanding of the absolute disavantage in unit costs of third world of how responsible such third world exports or FDI in the third world (which is quite small as a percentage of the total) is for union busting, stagnant wages, speed ups in the developed countries--leading to an unjustifiable prioritizing of the struggle for such social protection, tarriffs, or exclusion of China from the WTO--as Hoffa is doing now.
Yours, Rakesh