IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isu/genres/5176.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Uncertain Benefits of Environmental Reform in Open Economies

Author

Listed:
  • Zhao, Jinhua
  • Karp, Larry
  • Sacheti, Sandeep

Abstract

We compare the short-run and long-run effects of environmental reform and harmonization under autarky and free trade. When trade is driven by environmental distortions rather than real relative advantages, harmonization of environmental policies, even if achieved by lowering standards in one country, can improve short-run aggregate welfare. With the possibility of multiple steady states, long-run considerations favor a ``race to the top'' rather than a ``race to the bottom'' even when upward and downward harmonizations are equivalent in the short run. For a country trapped in a low (or bad) steady state, environmental reform may not move it to a high (or good) steady state under autarky. However, under trade, harmonization of policies may enable this country to reach the high steady state. Conversely, reforms that increase the relative differences in distortions may, under trade, cause economies to move to a low steady state.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhao, Jinhua & Karp, Larry & Sacheti, Sandeep, 2003. "The Uncertain Benefits of Environmental Reform in Open Economies," Staff General Research Papers Archive 5176, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:isu:genres:5176
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ulph, Alistair, 1998. "Political institutions and the design of environmental policy in a federal system with asymmetric information," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(3-5), pages 583-592, May.

    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:isu:genres:5176. 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: Curtis Balmer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiasus.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.