Piecemeal Multilateral Environmental Policy Reforms under Asymmetric Oligopoly

We develop a general two‐country model with oligopolistic interdependence in which a fixed number of firms make their output and emission decisions simultaneously. We examine the effect of multilateral reforms of emission taxes on global emission levels. With sufficient asymmetry in pollution intensities between the two countries, a proportional multilateral increase in emission tax rates can increase global emission levels. However, a multilateral equal increase of emission tax rates unambiguously reduces global emission levels. We also consider the case of free entry and exit of firms, and find a rule of multilateral reforms which unambiguously lowers total emission levels.     

多边贸易谈判中的政策协调与交易

针对目前多边贸易谈判过程中出现的愈演愈烈的双边(诸边)合作和发展中国家的不断边际化问题,本文分别从国家和议题的视角对多边贸易谈判中的政策协调与交易进行了分析,指出国际经济领域将长期表现为多边合作和双边(诸边)合作的并行发展,建议发展中国家应充分利用谈判议题的互换来影响国际经济规则的制定。     

多边贸易体制下环境与贸易政策的结合

国际社会对全球环境危机的真实关切使世界贸易组织面临协调环境保护和自由贸易的任务。《建立世界贸易组织》前言第一次明确将可持续发展确立为新的多边贸易体制的基本原则和宗旨。本文首先论证了只有当环境政策和贸易自由化共同发展的时候，贸易才能对环境产生积极的影响，然后说明世界贸易组织的机制使环境和贸易政策的结合成为可能，最后介绍了世界贸易组织有关环境与贸易政策结合的法律与实践，并分析了存在的问题。     

Regional versus Multilateral Trade Liberalization,Environmental Taxation,and Welfare

The paper considers trade between identical countries with imperfectly competitive markets, and compares the impacts of regional and multilateral tariff reduction on strategic environmental taxation and welfare. While both forms of trade liberalization increase production and consumption in tariff‐reducing countries, regionalism also reduces production in a non‐participating country and may decrease its consumption. Consequently, regionalism and multilateralism change pollution tax and welfare in the tariff‐reducing countries in similar ways when pollution is local, but in dissimilar ways for global pollution. When pollution is global, regionalism is likely to be preferred to multilateralism for the establishment of free trade among countries.     

Trade Structure, Transboundary Pollution and Multilateral Trade Liberalization: The Effects on Environmental Taxes and Welfare

This paper considers a trade situation where the production activities of potentially heterogeneous countries generate pollution which can cross borders and harm the well-being of all the countries involved. In each of those countries the policy maker levies pollution taxes on the polluting firms and a tariff on imports in order to correct that distortion. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the effect of a reduction in the tariff on equilibrium pollution taxes and welfare. The existing literature has investigated this problem for trade between two identical countries. This paper analyzes the problem in the more realistic context where countries are not necessarily identical and trade can be multilateral. It becomes possible to show what bias is introduced when those two realities are neglected. I find that a tariff reduction can actually lower output; it can also lower welfare even if pollution is purely local.     

Pollution Policy and Trade Liberalization of Environmental Goods

During the Doha Round at the World Trade Organization, reductions in trade barriers on environmental goods (EG) were put forward as a means of helping developed and developing countries alike deal with current environmental problems. We examine the potential effectiveness of such a strategy in a developing country that imports all its consumption of EG from an imperfectly competitive foreign eco-industry. We point out that trade liberalization of EG might in fact lead to less stringent pollution taxes, which can result in an actual rise in pollution levels. We then show that the environmental effectiveness objective of this trade reform can be achieved when the regulator uses quantitative abatement standards as an alternative pollution policy instrument. However, this environmental achievement comes at the expense of social welfare.     

Environment and Trade: The Relationship of International Trade and Environmental Policy

Followers of urban affairs and public policy have written much over the years about the rise of suburbia and development beyond older city boundaries in the US, whether such development is called urban, suburban, or ex-urban sprawl. Many researchers have focused on various issues concerning sprawl, especially on the unintended consequences that new development has had for municipal finances, neighborhood income and residential segregation, and transportation planning, among other issues. Over the last decade, a new area in the literature on sprawl has focused on how the “built environment” of residential areas can impact health and emergency services. We contribute to this latest set of papers on sprawl by trying to empirically estimate the impact of sprawl in metropolitan regions on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) spending on “public assistance.” This assistance encompasses spending on debris removal, emergency protective measures, and rehabilitating or rebuilding of infrastructure, public buildings, public utilities, parks and recreational areas, in post-disaster relief efforts. In our exploratory analysis, the results indicate that urban sprawl is a factor in influencing the level of FEMA’s public assistance spending.     

Environmental Policy, Intra-Industry Trade and Transfrontier Pollution

The paper discusses effects of domestic environmental policy on foreignemissions and on transboundary pollution. We use a Dixit-Stiglitz typemodel of monopolistic competition with an endogenous number of firms.Production generates environmental externalities which spill over to theother country. It is shown that environmental policy has an impact onmarket structure at home and abroad. These market structure effectsinduce changes in emissions abroad. In contrast to what has been derivedin earlier contributions, it turns out to be possible that tighterenvironmental standards at home lead to less emissions abroad. The paperderives these results and provides the economic intuition behind them.Finally, conditions for optimal environmental policies are derived.     

影响我国环境库兹涅茨曲线的外贸与环境政策分析

环境库兹涅茨曲线(EKC)体现了一国经济增长与环境污染的关系.本文以1990～2005年我国工业污染的数据为基础,描绘出我国EKC是"N"字型波浪式上升的,阐述了产生这一特点的贸易政策和环境政策的影响因素,肯定了政府的环保政策对于环境恶化的控制效果,但认为政府的直接干预只是协调经济增长与环境污染关系的外部手段,提高经济运行效率才是解决问题的根本途径.     

Bilateral Trade Agreements and the Feasibility of Multilateral Free Trade

We studied how the pursuit of bilateral free‐trade agreements (FTAs) affects the likelihood of achieving multilateral free trade. We derive and compare the stable Nash equilibria of two games of trade liberalization: in the FTA game, each country can either form an FTA with one of its trading partners or both of them or none of them, whereas in the (restricted) No FTA game, purely bilateral FTAs are not permitted. The major result is that there exist circumstances under which the freedom to pursue (discriminatory) bilateral FTAs is necessary for achieving multilateral free trade.     

Trade,Strategic Environmental Policy,and Global Pollution

This paper examines the effects of international trade in a model with global pollution that accumulates over time because of production emissions in each country. If countries cooperatively determine their environmental policies, autarky and free trade in the absence of trade costs generate the same optimal solution. By contrast, if environmental policies are determined noncooperatively, the effects of trade on global pollution and welfare are ambiguous because policy games can result in multiple equilibria. Although trade increases both the lower and upper bounds of the pollution stock, whether trade expands the range of possible steady‐state pollution levels is ambiguous. The analysis then extends to consider trade costs.     

Financial Crisis, “New” Industrial Policy,and the Bite of Multilateral Trade Rules

The recent Great Recession has triggered substantial government intervention – not all of it macroeconomic. This article presents evidence that the sectoral incidence and forms of government intervention appear to have changed from pre-crisis regularities. Once the commercial significance of a sector is taken into account, pre-crisis measures of trade policy intervention poorly predict the crisis-era sectoral incidence of discriminatory state measures imposed by Asian governments. Qualitative evidence focusing on three key countries in Asia – China, Japan, and South Korea – is also marshaled to sustain the contention that Asian governments have used the recent economic crisis to reinvigorate industrial policies, targeting apparent growth poles and apparently environmentally friendly technologies and sectors. Implications for the expansion of World Trade Organization rules and their effectiveness are discussed.     

Welfare Effect of Mergers and Multilateral Trade Liberalization

In a two‐country model where firms behave à la Cournot, we show that trade liberalization increases (decreases) the social desirability of those mergers that generate sufficiently large (small) reductions in marginal cost. There exists a range of intermediate levels of marginal cost savings such that marginal tariff reductions increase (decrease) the desirability of merger at sufficiently low (high) tariff levels. Moreover, in the neighborhood of free trade, we show that if trade liberalization increases the profitability of a merger, it necessarily also increases its desirability.     

Strategic Environmental Policy under Free Trade with Transboundary Pollution

We analyze the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policies in a strategic setting when there is transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental taxes, which makes both countries worse off. This is not due to the terms of trade motive, but rather the incentive, in a strategic setting, to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution. With command and control policies (emission quotas), countries are unable to influence foreign emissions by strategic choice of domestic policy; hence, there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable quotas, unless pollution is a pure global public bad, there is a race to the bottom in environmental policy. Under free trade, internationally nontradable quotas result in the lowest pollution level and strictly welfare‐dominate taxes. The ordering of internationally tradable quotas and pollution taxes depends, among other things, on the degree of international pollution spillovers.     

Regionalism and Multilateral Trade Liberalization with Asymmetric Countries

The paper examines the impact of regionalism on the process of multilateral trade liberalization when countries are asymmetric. The author uses a three‐country, three‐good, competing exporters model, with countries being symmetric in everything but their discount factors. The equilibrium regional agreement is found to be a customs union between a patient and an impatient country and that the impact of regionalism depends on the discount factors. The impact of regionalism on multilateral trade liberalization depends critically on which countries engage in regionalism.     

国际多边贸易体制与OHSAS18000研究

全球经济一体化背景下,企业经济利益的需求在国际贸易活动中必然追求成本与比较优势的差异,职业安全卫生问题正受到国际组织的密切关注。发达国家和国际组织把职业安全与卫生和贸易结合起来,形成新的多边谈判非关税贸易壁垒,中国在加入WTO能否迅速融入国际多边贸易体制,建立符合国际标准的职业安全卫生制度至关重要。     

我国多边贸易中污染产品的变迁

本文通过对我国污染产品的对外贸易进出口额经标准化处理后的贸易差额和贸易份额的定量计算,得出我国在改革开放20年的对外多边贸易中污染产品的变迁规律,并提出了相应的政策建议。     

贸易自由化、纵向关联市场与战略性环境政策——环境税对发展绿色贸易的意义

本文在一个两国出口至第三国的连续双寡模型中,研究贸易自由化对均衡环境政策及社会福利的影响。分析发现:(1)战略性环境政策的租金攫取效应可通过中间产品出口实现,但不一定会通过最终产品出口实现。(2)当污染的环境损害程度不大时,贸易自由化将降低各国环境税,从而使各国的环境保护出现"向底线赛跑";当环境损害系数较大时,贸易自由化将提高各国环境税。(3)社会福利水平为双边关税壁垒的凹函数(呈"倒U型"),贸易自由化对社会福利的影响不确定。此外,本文还分析了合理征收环境税对发展我国绿色贸易的意义。     

Effects of Multilateral Trade Liberalization on Prices*

To analyze the effects of simultaneous tariff reductions by multiple importing countries on prices, we construct a simple three‐country model where a good is produced by a monopolist with nonconstant marginal cost and imported by two countries. We compare two representative tariff‐reduction formulas: the “fixed‐amount” and the “uniform percentage” reductions. The uniform percentage reductions may increase the consumer price in the importing country, whose initial tariff is lower. Thus, importing countries with relatively low tariffs may prefer a bilateral trade agreement to a multilateral one to ensure consumer gains.