Debora L. Spar

The Spotlight and the Bottom Line: How Multinationals Export Human Rights

In 1996 Kathie Lee Gifford made frontpage news. The well-liked television personality had lent her name to a discount line of womens clothing that, it was discovered, had been made by underage Central American workers. That same year, the Walt Disney Company was exposed contracting with Haitian suppliers who paid their workers less than Haitis minimum wage of

Foreign direct investment and the demand for protection in the United States

2.40 a day. Nike and Reebok, makers of perhaps the worlds most popular athletic footwear, were similarly and repeatedly exposed.

For love and money: the political economy of commercial surrogacy

Over the past decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States has grown dramatically, changing the composition of many U.S. industries and bringing foreignowned firms into the domestic political process. Presumably, FDI also has affected the politics of protection, by both altering the domestic coalitions around protectionist demands and shifting the potential benefits that protectionism is likely to bring. To understand this process, we create and test a model that examines the level of inward investment and the extent to which this investment either complements or substitutes for existing import levels. Import-complementing investment, we suggest, will cause a split in protectionist demands, with local producers favoring protectionism and foreign investors pushing for free trade. Import-substituting investment, by contrast, will create convergent interests between local and foreign producers. In both cases, inward FDI reshuffles traditional alliances and demands for protection, challenging many prevailing views about protectionism in the United States.

Trade, investment, and labor: The case of Indonesia

Since the 1980s, the international market for commercial surrogacy has grown at a quiet but considerable pace. Each year, thousands of women agree to carry, for a fee, the child of another woman. Thousands of babies are born as a result on shaky legal legs: conceived by one set of parents yet claimed by another. Most of these children were born in the market as well as the womb, the product of desire combined with the ability to pay. The central argument of this paper is that surrogacy must be approached as a commercial relationship. There is already an active international trade in the components of baby production – wombs, sperm and eggs. There are rapidly advancing technologies that are certain to expand both the demand for surrogacy services and the supply of surrogate mothers. Yet the underpinnings of the surrogacy market – the rules, laws, rights and contracts – have been notably slower to evolve. Legislative bodies in both the United States and Europe have been loath to deal directly with the issue of surrogacy, intervening primarily in the form of prohibition. Yet because the demand function in this market can be so intense, couples are entering into surrogacy arrangements even when they suspect that the underlying contract is either illegal or unenforceable. Fundamentally, commercial surrogacy is an issue of political economy. It involves an economic relationship that sits within a deeply political calculus, one that goes to the very heart of political economy. What, the debate over surrogacy asks, can legitimately be sold in a market transaction? Who decides? And how can any authority weigh the desires of having a child against the dangers of selling one?

Beyond globalism : remaking American foreign economic policy

Abstract Rapid industrialization and urbanization spurred on by a surge in foreign investment is often considered typical of newly industrializing countries (NICs). But in Indonesia, the combination of late development and an authoritarian state has created a particularly potent mix, one that has raised more questions than usual about the effects of growth, trade, and investment on labor conditions and local standards of living. The basic motives of foreign direct investment (FDI) are said to create a pattern that is inherently ripe for exploitation, since the capital, technology and market access all rest with the foreign investor. The author uses the Indonesian case to explore factors that might reduce exploitation. While conceding that foreign investment is likely to affect labor conditions in the host economy, especially in times of rapid growth, she cautions against presuming that the consequences will be mainly negative with respect to the living standards and basic human rights of the local population.

Selling stem cell science: how markets drive law along the technological frontier.

Vernon, the acknowledged authority in international economics, analyzes the past, present and dangerous future of American trade politics and policymaking. He recommends giving up on comprehensive global agreements, and urges narrow agreements between a small number of countries.

Iron triangles and revolving doors : cases in U.S. foreign economic policymaking

I. INTRODUCTION Since 2001, stem cell science in the United States has been explicitly constrained by federal prohibitions.1 Under an executive order announced by President George W. Bush on August 9 of that year, U.S. researchers can only receive federal funding for work done on the limited number of embryonic stem cell lines (an estimated sixty to sevent-eight) created prior to the executive order.2 Continued research on embryonic stem cells (ESCs) is not expressly prohibited. But, under the Bush administrations executive order, no federal funds can be used to develop new embryonic stem cells lines, or even to work on new lines developed after August 2001. The problems with these restrictions, according to their critics, are three-fold. First, they sharply limit the funds available to a high-cost, early-stage endeavor, limiting the pace of scientific discovery in the process. Second, they force stem cell researchers to maintain an administratively absurd line between research conducted in federally-funded laboratories (which include most university facilities) and that conducted in spaces free of federal funds. Third, restrictions push promising scientists to work in the shadow of the law, engaging in cutting-edge research practices that might also be deemed illegal. Embryonic stem cell research received

The Power of Activism: Assessing the Impact of NGOs on Global Business

40 million in federal funds in 2005, a fraction of the total

The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception

28 billion the NIH spent on biomedical research in that year.3 The Bush administrations prohibitions threaten the state and future of stem cell research in the United States.4 However, this article posits that breakthrough science can emerge without federal funding, even without the formal sanction of the law. To make this argument, we review the history of two earlier breakthrough technologies, the birth control pill and in vitro fertilization (IVT), both of which developed in the United States without federal funds and in an environment of ambiguous legality.5 All three of these technologies, of course, bear an intimate relationship with female reproduction. The birth control pill prevents conception by altering a womans reproductive hormones; IVF enables otherwise infertile women to conceive outside their wombs; and embryonic stem cell research, at least in its current incarnation, requires the use and manipulation of human eggs and embryos. Currently, moral opposition to this use of reproductive material drives federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Or as President Bush announced in his executive order: At its core, this issue forces us to confront fundamental questions about the beginnings of life and the ends of science. It lies at a difficult moral intersection, juxtaposing the need to protect life in all its phases with the prospect of saving and improving life in all its stages . . . . My position on these issues is shaped by deeply held beliefs.6 As we describe below, such opposition is not new. In fact, both the pill and IVF faced similar sentiments at the time of their early development and similar restrictions at both the federal and state levels.7 Today, however, the birth control pill and in vitro fertilization are booming businesses, each estimated to generate annual revenues of well over

Lawyers Abroad: The Internationalization of Legal Practice

3 billion.8 The moral opprobrium that once surrounded them has declined, as have the legal restrictions that once bound them.9 Federal funds support continued research into contraception and private funds have more than compensated for the lack of federal monies devoted to IVF research.10 The histories of the pill and IVF, therefore, suggest a pattern that may be highly relevant for embryonic stem cell research. They suggest that science frequently encounters moral opposition at the cutting edge of development, and that this opposition translates easily into legal prohibitions and restrictions on federal funding. In this regard, the current status of U.S. stem cell research is hardly unprecedented. …