IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ajagec/v84y2002i4p887-901.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Productivity Growth and Environmental Regulation in Mexican and U.S. Food Manufacturing

Author

Listed:
  • Ebru Alpay
  • Joe Kerkvliet
  • Steven Buccola

Abstract

Many argued during the NAFTA debate that trade liberalization would favor Mexican over U.S. food processors, especially because of lax environmental laws south of the border. We find through an examination of profit functions that productivity growth in Mexico has outstripped that in the United States, suggesting free trade indeed will benefit Mexican suppliers. U.S. pollution regulations have had no impact on the profitability or productivity of U.S. food manufacturing. In contrast, Mexico's swiftly rising environmental standards have enhanced food processors' productivity growth, corroborating the Porter hypothesis. Pollution law, therefore, has favored Mexican over U.S. food processing, but for reasons few had anticipated. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Ebru Alpay & Joe Kerkvliet & Steven Buccola, 2002. "Productivity Growth and Environmental Regulation in Mexican and U.S. Food Manufacturing," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 84(4), pages 887-901.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:84:y:2002:i:4:p:887-901
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-8276.00041
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:84:y:2002:i:4:p:887-901. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.