How to address the link between environmental regulation and trade was an important part of discussions at the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. Trade ministers agreed to launch negotiations on trade and the environment, specifically clarification of WTO rules. The authors address an important part of the background context for deciding whether or how to link trade agreements to the environment from a developing country perspective.The authors ask whether environmental regulations affect exports of pollution-intensive or"dirty"goods in 24 countries between 1994 and 1998. Based on a Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model, net exports in five pollution-intensive industries are regressed on factor endowments and measures of environmental standards (legislation in force). The results suggest that, if country heterogeneity such as enforcement of environmental regulations is controlled for, more stringent environmental standards imply lower net exports of metal mining, nonferrous metals, iron, and steel and chemicals. The authors find find that a trade agreement on a common environmental standard will cost a non-OECD country substantially more than an OECD country. Developing countries will, on average, reduce exports of the five pollution-intensive products by 0.37 percent of GNP. This represents 11 percent of annual exports of these products from the 24 studied countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.