Can R&D-inducing green tariffs replace international environmental regulations?

This paper investigates the link between trade and environment by exploring the effects of green tariffs on innovation, location of production and the environment. It shows that tariffs levied on polluting goods could result in less world pollution than global harmonization of environmental standards by inducing more pollution-abatement R&D effort and generating lower unit emissions from production. Specifically, green tariffs reduce pollution by (1) shifting production to the region where environmental standards are respected, (2) inducing the firm in the clean country to engage in more abatement R&D by granting it a higher market power/share in its home market, (3) instigating green R&D investment by deterring delocation. When these outweigh the R&D-creating effect of environmental harmonization in the dirty country, green tariffs bring about a cleaner environment.     

Trade liberalization in environmental goods

Trade negotiations have started to pay attention to liberalization in environmental goods (EGs), whose production may require dirty intermediate goods. We construct a two-country trade model to explore the effects of trade liberalization in EGs on the local pollution, the global environment and welfare in the presence of such an environmental conundrum. We find that countries do not necessarily benefit from trade liberalization in EGs in the absence of an environmental policy. With the assistance of an upstream pollution tax, trade liberalization in EGs improves each country's welfare. This result holds independent of whether the upstream market is competitive or not, or whether we have upstream trade across countries. For asymmetric countries, trade liberalization in EGs improves the world welfare and the welfare for the country if it has a smaller demand for EGs; or experiences less damage from the production of dirty inputs; or values environment improvement more.     

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.     

Intra‐industry Trade Liberalization and the Environment

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects national and global pollution in a multi‐country model incorporating monopolistic competition and intra‐industry trade as well as inter‐industry trade. Each country produces skill‐intensive differentiated goods and labor‐intensive goods. Pollution is a by‐product of production but pollution abatement can be undertaken. Regardless of country characteristics, if the differentiated‐good sector is sufficiently cleaner (dirtier) then, without any change in environmental taxes, a multilateral reduction in import protection accorded to the differentiated good or to both goods typically leads to a decline (rise) in pollution in all countries. Pollution havens tend not to arise.     

中美贸易中隐含的碳排放以及贸易环境效应——基于环境投入产出法的实证分析

中美贸易的巨额逆差带来的不仅仅是贸易问题,还包括一系列的环境问题。利用环境投入产出模型测算1997年-2009年中美贸易中所隐含的CO2排放量,得出如下结论:中美贸易中中国大部分行业污染贸易条件均大于1,且呈不断恶化趋势;出口规模越大、贸易竞争力越强的产业单位出口的CO2排放强度越小,中国出口美国的产品与污染品并无必然联系;美国对华FDI转移并未引起美国污染产业向中国转移,而全球FDI向华转移使得"污染天堂"理论在华成立;中国出口CO2排放速度低于其出口速度,单位出口的CO2排放强度呈下降趋势;改变中国污染顺差国的地位,中国需加强对美国污染品的进口,积极改变粗放型的生产方式,加快对价值链高端清洁产品的生产。     

Open-access renewable resources and pollution: Trade and policy implications in a two-country model

We examine the interaction between the relative inter-industry pollution externality and resource stock externality of harvesting in deciding trade patterns and welfare gains from trade in a two-country model (less-developed countries) with renewable resources in the absence of resource management. This paper focuses on the impacts of trade policies on resource conservation and welfare outcomes in two countries with different environmental management regimes. Differences in pollution management standards between both countries determine the direction of trade flow and gains from trade in a diversified production case. The country with a lower pollution intensity parameter, an exporter of resource goods, certainly experiences welfare loss in the post-trade steady-state and may also suffer a decline in utility throughout the transition path. However, a country with higher pollution intensity and importers of resource goods tend to gain from trade. Under national open-access resources, given that pollution is regulated up to a certain point in both countries, this study finds that implementing better restrictions on only one externality factor is not optimal from a post-trade welfare perspective. Lastly, from the point of view of policy suggestion, this paper offers an optimal trade policy that the economic and environmental effects of enforcing import tax on resource goods are likely to be Pareto-improving consequences compared to the implications of using an export tax.     

Asymmetric Tax Policy Responses in Large Economies With Cross-Border Pollution

We build a model of cross-border pollution between two large open economies, one importing the polluting good and the other exporting it, and derive their non-cooperative trade and environmental tax policies. We show among other things, that (1) in response to a bilateral reduction in trade taxes by both countries, the former country’s optimal policy is to lower its Nash emissions tax while the latter’s is to raise it, and (2) in response to an increase in emissions tax rates by both countries, the former country’s optimal reaction is to raise its Nash import tariff, while the latter’s is to reduce its Nash export tax. That is, in the present context, freer trade leads the exporting country to adopt stricter while the importing country laxer environmental tax policies.     

Increasing Returns and International Trade

The paper develops a model of international trade with increasing returns toscale by taking into account the possibility of cooperation among agents in an egalitarian economy. It is shown that each country gains from trade in a trading world in which there are arbitrary numbers of increasing-returns-to-scale goods, constant-returns-to-scale goods, factors of production, and countries.     

Pollution Offshoring and Emission Reductions in EU and US Manufacturing

Between 1995 and 2008, the European Union and the United States raised environmental standards and concurrently experienced important reductions in emissions from manufacturing despite a rise in output. Levinson (Am Econ Rev 99(5):2177–2192, 2009) finds that the offshoring of polluting industries to countries with lower environmental standards played only small role in the cleanup of US manufacturing, which was largely due to improvements in production technique. But there is no evidence of whether US patterns hold in other developed economies. I provide the first analysis of the pollution intensity of EU production and imports to examine which forces drove the EU cleanup. I find that concerns about the effect of pollution offshoring were unfounded in the European Union, not because the effect was small like in the United States, but because the patterns of specialization of EU production and imports were exactly opposite to what pollution offshoring would predict. Starting in the early 2000s, EU manufacturing increasingly produced more pollution-intensive goods while imports became progressively less pollution-intensive, especially from low-income countries. There are two notable exceptions: primary aluminum and electrometallurgical products, except steel, which do provide evidence of offshoring from the EU to lower income countries. The “brown” specialization of EU production is difficult to explain, but about a quarter can be matched by increased demand for EU exports of polluting goods. However, similar to the US cleanup, changes in production and imports were overwhelmed by improvements in production technique, which were the main drivers of the cleanup of manufacturing.     

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.     

Environmental capital flight and pollution tax

This paper analyzes the impacts of a production pollution tax on environmental capital flight and national product in a two-country static general equilibrium model with two-way foreign investment. It is assumed that the capital input in both countries is a composite good of domestic and imported capital. And pollution is assumed to originate in the production process. The productivity of capital in each country is negatively (or positively) related to the worldwide aggregate emissions.The analysis shows that when a domestic pollution tax is levied, domestic capital outflows increase and foreign capital inflows decrease for sufficiently high elasticities of substitution between labor (immobile input) and capital (mobile input) in both countries. Moreover, with negative transnational externalities, increases of a domestic pollution tax reduce domestic production and increase foreign production. The difficulty of substitution between immobile and mobile inputs hinders the optimal allocation of worldwide capital and national product. In this paper, the optimal pollution tax is based on global welfare maximization, not on global income maximization, taking into consideration the impact of income change on individual welfare. Therefore, an optimal pollution tax in the developing country should be lower for a given rate of pollution.     

Pollution Control in Open Economies: Implications of Within-period Interactions for Dynamic Game Equilibrium

This paper examines a two-country, dynamic game model of pollution control in the presence of economic interactions between countries within a period, as well as the environmental interaction between periods (i.e., a change in the stock of global pollution). These economic interactions emerge because of changes in the terms of trade of polluting goods or the market share of domestic polluting industries. It is shown that if within-period externalities exist, a noncooperative equilibrium may result in a smaller stock of global pollution in the steady state than does international cooperation. Moreover, the properties of equilibrium paths depend on the direction and size of such externalities. In addition, trigger strategy equilibria that achieve the outcome of the collusive solution are examined.     

Transboundary Pollution and International Migration

We analyze the welfare effects of international migration in the presence of transboundary pollution. We use a simplified Copeland and Taylor (1999) model, where the (developed) home country's pollution abatement technology is superior to that of the (less developed) foreign country. If there is no trade, workers will migrate from the foreign country to the home country. The foreign country gains from migration, but whether the home country gains or not depends on the abatement‐technology gap and the magnitude of the coefficient of transboundary pollution. World welfare will increase under migration. If there is free trade in goods, international migration occurs when the home country specializes in the production of the environmentally sensitive good. In this case, migration will result in increased production of the manufactured good and increase the level of world pollution.     

Environmental policy instruments and imperfectly competitive international trade

Policy makers, industrialists and environmentalists express concern that the imposition of tough environmental policies in some countries displaces production, and hence pollution, to countries which impose less tough environmental policies. Yet empirical studies of such impacts suggest they are small. However, these findings are derived from models in which international trade is modelled as being perfectly competitive. In this paper I model trade as imperfectly competitive with scope for strategic behavior by producers, in this case investment in capital. I show that the choice of environmental policy instrument can have a marked impact on the incentives for producers to act strategically, with environmental standards significantly reducing the incentives for strategic overinvestment relative to environmental taxes or no environmental policy at all. Whether welfare is higher using standards or taxes depends on whether producing countries are also significant consumers of the polluting product, and on whether all producing governments act to reduce emissions or only some subset of governments. To assess the quantitative significance of these theoretical results I conduct policy simulations on a calibrated model of the world fertilizer industry. These simulations show that the impact of environmental policy on strategic behaviour can be large.     

Induced Institutional Change in the Trade and Environment Debate

Because of the assumption of constant emission factors, economy-environment models often show that free trade has negative environmental consequences. However, this pessimistic view ignores the possibility of trade strengthening the demand for regulatory institutions. An `institutional optimism hypothesis, stating that the net environmental result of trade liberalization is benign, is thus formulated in this paper. The hypothesis is examined with a CGE model that treats institutional change as an endogenous process dependent on income. Application to NAFTA, using a broad range of scenarios, provides some support for the institutional optimism hypothesis. The net pollution effect of trade liberalization is in many cases beneficial or low, even for the country specializing in polluting industries. The implication is that in many cases environmental interests are served better by a focus on institution building in trading partners, than on the process of trade liberalization itself.     

Is Local Food More Environmentally Friendly? The GHG Emissions Impacts of Consuming Imported versus Domestically Produced Food

With the increased interest in the ‘carbon footprint’ of global economic activities, civil society, governments and the private sector are calling into question the wisdom of transporting food products across continents instead of consuming locally produced food. While the proposition that local consumption will reduce one’s carbon footprint may seem obvious at first glance, this conclusion is not at all clear when one considers that the economic emissions intensity of food production varies widely across regions. In this paper we concentrate on the tradeoff between production and transport emissions reductions by testing the following hypothesis: Substitution of domestic for imported food will reduce the direct and indirect Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated with consumption. We focus on ruminant livestock since it has the highest emissions intensity across food sectors, but we also consider other food products as well, and alternately perturb the mix of domestic and imported food products by a marginal (equal) amount. We then compare the emissions associated with each of these consumption changes in order to compute a marginal emissions intensity of local food consumption, by country and product. The variations in regional ruminant emissions intensities have profound implications for the food miles debate. While shifting consumption patterns in wealthy countries from imported to domestic livestock products reduces GHG emissions associated with international trade and transport activity, we find that these transport emissions reductions are swamped by changes in global emissions due to differences in GHG emissions intensities of production. Therefore, diverting consumption to local goods only reduces global emissions when undertaken in regions with relatively low emissions intensities. For non-ruminant products, the story is more nuanced. Transport costs are more important in the case of dairy products and vegetable oils. Overall, domestic emissions intensities are the dominant part of the food miles story in about 90 % of the country/commodity cases examined here.     

Fragmentation, Engel's Law, and Learning

This paper outlines the conditions under which trade is beneficial for a developing country's growth. A developing country suffers from two disadvantages: low income and a comparative disadvantage in the production of modern manufactured goods—goods which allow a high rate of human capital accumulation through learning by doing. Low income together with Engel's law imply that developing countries consume and produce very few modern goods in autarky and hence grow slowly. With international fragmentation of production, a developing country may find comparative advantage in the production of some stages of modern goods despite an absence of comparative advantage in the production of modern goods under “100% local content.” More resources can then be allocated to the modern goods sector leading to greater learning externalities and hence growth under free trade than in autarky.     

The Strategic and Effective Dimensions of the Border Tax Adjustment

Between 2001 and 2011, the Kyoto Protocol has experienced defections of two countries that took part in its negotiation and accounted for around 44% of all parties' emissions. The border tax adjustment, a tax levied on imports to reproduce domestic taxation on similar goods, is advocated to prevent such compliance failures as well as to support unilateral pollution regulations by mitigating firms' competitiveness losses and carbon leakages. The paper investigates whether this trade instrument can constitute a decentralized solution to achieve the first‐best in a noncooperative framework. It develops a two‐country two‐firm reciprocal‐market model of trade with global pollution and country heterogeneity. Countries' interactions are studied following a noncooperative game theory approach, for two scenarios defined by the possibility to implement a border tax adjustment to sanction unilateral deviation from the cooperative situation. The paper predicts first that this opportunity modifies the countries' choices of strategies toward more compliance; second that among the strategic and effective dimensions of the border tax adjustment, only the former allows to achieve the first‐best; finally that the border tax adjustment fosters countries' participation in the cooperative international environmental agreement.     

International production fragmentation,trade in intermediate goods and environment

This paper examines the implications of growing international production fragmentation-induced trade in intermediate goods on environmental quality. Specifically, by making use of a general equilibrium framework, this paper explores the link between trade in intermediate goods and pollution in a setting of endogenous environmental policy. The paper shows that international trade in intermediate goods, through an increase in the number of components available to the international producers, affects the level of pollution and environmental quality. Specifically, developed countries may reduce pollution at the cost of more pollution in developing countries.     

Trade and the governance of ecosystem services

We work with a basic general equilibrium model of an economy with an industrial good and a rural good. Industrial good production results in pollution that affects the provision of ecosystem services and thereby the production of the rural good. The assignment of ecosystem rights to the industrial polluters or to the rural pollutees results in differential transaction costs that affect production possibilities between the two goods. Ecosystem rights are assigned to maximize social welfare. Over time, technological change and differences in income superiority affect the choice of the assignment of rights. Opening to trade affects the choice of the assignment of ecosystem rights depending on the nature of technological change, but the relative income superiority of goods no longer affects the assignment of ecosystem rights in a small economy. Thus, among other findings, we demonstrate that the phenomena known as the environmental Kuznets curve does not hold for the protection of ecosystem services in production, or production externalities generally, because trade separates consumption from production.