Do e-commerce sites have to state the country of origin? - North American and European answer

http://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-compulsory-for-clothing-e-commerce-websites-to-specify-on-each-product-page-where-the-clothes-were-produced

The link has a couple of answers for two different trading blocks, North America and Europe.

The American answer says there is a law forcing people to state the country of origin, but that it isn't enforced.

The European answer states that EU makers are too-much lobbied or too feckless to allow their voters such information. The European Union finds it impossible to do something that's possible in America. However things might be changing with a 2014 EU directive, opposed by German and UK delegates, to make force EU manufacturers to label their EU origins.

Neither answer states where to look-up the law or lack of law, but both look pretty convincing and one has links to parliamentary debates on the subject

That's it.

Here are some related blog posts and afterthoughts.

• Veganline.com is a shoe shop that tries to sell UK-made products and label by country of origin.
  Make It British has a couple of posts about labelling. I hope to get a bit of search ranking by publishing this related stuff.
• https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/10/bad-economics-teaching.html is a post about how bad econmics teaching works. Teachers get lecture notes and such from the McGraw Hill Publishing Company, teach from the textbook, and avoid facts.
• Pantstopoverty.org.uk is a salvedged web site, reclaimed in order to write why the great Pants to Poverty craze did not take-off in proportion to costs as hoped. A review of social enterprise examples, one or two per country for a European Parliament committee, says that Pants "only" sold £250,000-worth in a good year. Maybe the problem was that Pants to Poverty were wrong about whether they were helping. 
• http://makeitbritish.co.uk/uk-manufacturing-2/a-step-forward-for-made-in-britain-labelling/
• http://makeitbritish.co.uk/made_in_britain/made-britain-labels-become-compulsory/
  Here is a related subject: how to tell people that your product is made in the UK. A tricky point because you have already spent money on the income tax and national insurance of people who make the product, their high rent, and the costs of safety laws or general civic stuff that don't apply in China or Rana Plaza so there is no money left-over for anything else, like explaining sales points.
• Vistaprint used to offer more cashback through cashback web sites than they charged in their postage-only offer on 250 template cards with a lie on the back - a note that business cards are free when they're not. They've also cancelled their union jack template from their cheapest templates, so the days of making money by ordering swing tags are over unfortunately.
• Moorplan sell some cheap made-in cards, one country only.
  Walk-in to a shop to buy 100 at 3-4p per card.
  Order 1 box @ 1000 online and pay delivery but a lower rate per card.
  Order 2 box @ 2000 online to get 1.6p per card with free delivery.
  
  Moorplan also sell woven name tapes rather like over-size cashe's school name tapes in black or white to say "made in england". I plan to do a post on product labelling some time and so shall keep the other options secret to build-up anticipation. 

If you print your own cards in colour and want a first idea for a design, there's a free one commissioned by a firm called Stoves.co.uk available to anyone who makes something in Britain, as enforceable by trading standards agencies. It is an open source design. They no longer promote the scheme and have picked a niftier logo for a new scheme that you have to subscribe to. Neither logo suggests why anybody should care what country something is made-in, and both are brash about origin in a way that's out of fashion everywhere but sports grounds, but hey.

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Blog on a single page from Veganline.com the vegan shoe shop