The Labor Provisions in Trade Agreements (LABPTA) dataset provides systematic data on the design of labor provisions (LPs) in 492 preferential trade agreements spanning the period 1990-2015. It provides the most comprehensive coding of such provisions to date, covering 140 distinct items organized into six overarching categories, namely: (1) Aspirational statements relating to LPs in preamble and objectives of the agreement (P); 2) Substantive commitments in relation to LPs (S); 3) Obligations in relation to substantive LPs (O); 4) Enforceability of the substantive LPs (E); 5) Cooperation commitments over LPs (C); and 6) Institutions overseeing the labor-related commitments (I).The LABPTA dataset provides systematic data on the design of labor provisions (LPs) in 492 preferential trade agreements (PTAs) spanning the period 1990-2015. The dataset is the most comprehensive of its kind on two accounts. First, drawing on the DESTA dataset for the underlying treaty texts, it is the most extensive in terms of the number of PTAs covered, including not only agreements that have been notified to the WTO but also agreements that have not. Second, it provides the most detailed coding of LPs in PTAs to date, covering 140 distinct items organized into six overarching categories. We also provide three measures of the stringency of labor-related commitments in PTAs, two measures covering essential dimensions of stringency, namely enforcement and institutional set-up for monitoring, and one overall measure of the depth of LPs. By providing the coding of LPs at the most disaggregated level, the LABPTA dataset bears the promise of greater knowledge integration and accumulation within and across the methodological divides in the literature through a common framework.

The coding is carried out manually by the documentation of the actual articles where the specific labor-related commitments in the preferential trade agreements are included. Once the above coding is done, we generate a binary coding, where 0 means no commitment and 1 means there is specific commitment coded under the given heading.