As global sourcing has driven down contract prices and squeezed margins and wages among
export producers in the global South (the ‘race to the bottom’), building or re-building international
and state institutions that protect workers in export processing zones in the South has become an
urgent matter (Appelbaum et al 2005). In recent years, the condition of workers and the difficulty of
ensuring standards compliance in complex global production networks have increased pressure
from organized labour and NGOs to push labour provisions into bilateral and regional trade
agreements and even into the heart of policy agendas of Bretton Woods institutions such as the
World Bank and IMF. However, as Mayer and Pickles (2011) have pointed out, “significant
obstacles remain in the development of effective inter-governmental regulatory or distributive
governance capacity at the global or regional level.” In part this results from the erosion of
institutional and governance capacities at the level of the national state after 20 to 30 years of neoliberal
deregulation and market-based mechanisms, and in part it results from the mobility of global
value chain sourcing as it moves among low-cost producing locations in countries with less-welldeveloped
facilitative, regulatory, and compensatory capacities.