Regional issues in environmental management

This paper addresses environment management in East Asia. We first set out to examine whether the latecomer’s economies in East Asia enjoy technological spillover effects or suffer pollution haven damages in their environmental pollution management, in other words, which of latecomer’s advantage or latecomer’s disadvantage for pollution control dominates in East Asian economies. We found two contrasting results among the environmental indices: 1) per capita consumption of ozone-depleting substances and industrial organic water pollutant emissions indicate monotonic decreasing trends with per capita real GDP while per capita carbon dioxide emissions show monotonic increasing trend, and 2) consumption of ozone-depleting substances and industrial organic water pollutant emissions represent the dominance of the latecomer’s advantage while carbon dioxide emissions reveal that of the latecomer’s disadvantage. We second discuss what the regional framework of environmental cooperation should be in East Asia. We argue that non-binding approach as regional framework of environmental cooperation may be an optimal choice for East Asia, in the sense that it provides the “easier”, “faster” and “deeper” framework regardless of economical, political, and historical constraints.