Discussion Paper 32 – Working Conditions, Transparency, and Compliance in Global Value Chains: Evidence from Better Work Jordan

This paper estimates how compliance with national labor law and international labor standards within Jordan’s garment exporting factories changed after the implementation of a transparency program that made compliance assessments publicly available. The estimation employs data from Better Work Jordan that cover all garment-exporting factories over the 2008-2018 period. Using a difference-in-difference approach that is often applied to control for endogeneity, this paper finds that compliance improved following the implementation of transparency. Compliance increased in a group of 28 critical compliance areas that represent fundamental worker rights relative to relevant comparison groups. The results are robust to a number of additional controls, definitions of the transparency period, and estimation approaches.