Literature review and empirical evidence on Assessment of sustainability effects of voluntary and ethical trade standards

International trade brings economic prosperity to many countries (economic growth, increased income, job creation..). Still, at the same time, it may generate significant damages (overuse of land, biodiversity loss, labour rights violation, child labour and increased inequalities (Moïsé & Rubínová, 2021, 2021; Bradford, 2020). According to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDG, international trade can play a significant role in promoting sustainable development (Moïsé & Rubínová, 2021, WTO, 2022) by engaging multinational corporations and GVCs to spread social and environmental standards. Sustainable standards are widely analysed in literature as primary emerging forms of transnational regulation. Primarily, they aim to encourage more respectful practices of health, the environment, human and social rights, and sustainable development. The literature on voluntary standards has focused on their strategic use by stakeholders to serve various interests: NGOs use them to defend their causes, manufacturers use them to manage risks in their supply chains, comply with buyers' requirements, limit their costs and differentiate themselves on the market. Governments use them to regulate markets. At a more general level, various studies describe voluntary standards as forms of government. This rise in the power of standards has been accompanied by a shift in the responsibility for standardisation from nation-states to international entities such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or supranational entities such as the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), and then to private organisations that are in no way linked to states and that are formed in particular from transnational sectors and value chains that meet considerable economic challenges. Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are regulations created by non-state actors to improve the social and/or environmental impacts of multinational business, international trade, and/or global production networks. However, the status of private standards in the WTO remains problematic. Standards-takers are countries with little bargaining power, who cannot affect their terms of trade, and thus, even if they possess domestic antitrust laws, will find it hard to persuade standard-setters to take account of their interests (Mavroidis and Wolfe [...]