This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 28, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The tragic deaths of factory workers in Bangladesh gives us a chance to examine the good and bad of so-called sweat shops.

The typical policy responses to such a tragedy, however, typically fail to get at the heart of

the problem.

So says William Watson, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute. of the that collapsed while workers were working in the factory and over a

thousand people were killed. It took them a week to pull everybody out of the

rubble. It got a lot of international media attention and there have

been a number of responses from various governments and private parties to figure out how to prevent this from happening in the future and what should generally be done about the rise in in factory workers working in Bangladesh in dangerous conditions.

So what has been the policy response within the United States?

Well, the United States response has been to consider whether or

not to remove Bangladesh from a list of countries that receive a low tariff preference to the U.S. market.

So there are a number of products that can enter the U.S. market from Bangladesh

at basically zero tariffzero tariff level.

Clothing is not one of those, but nevertheless,

there's been some concern that perhaps raising that level, raising that level

the level of tariffs imposed on those products would help

induce

Bangladesh to to change its practices.

The problem with that is that you're just increasing taxes on the people of Bangladesh

and removing their access to the U.S. market, this would be a big hit on their economy.

Having market access to foreign consumers is a really good thing for any economy.

...