IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rff/dpaper/dp-02-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Multilateral Trade Agreements and Market-Based Environmental Policies

Author

Listed:
  • Fischer, Carolyn

    (Resources for the Future)

  • Hoffmann, Sandra

    (Resources for the Future)

  • Yoshino , Yutaka

Abstract

We review the legal provisions of the WTO regime that have important implications for national, market-based environmental policies. We evaluate those provisions for their effects on a member country’s ability and incentives to design economically efficient environmental policies. International trade institutions do not recognize the polluter pays principle, posing some challenges for unilateral policies addressing cross-border pollutants and leakage. Nor do they recognize the economic equivalence of emission tax and permit regimes, leading to different potential constraints on policy design and leaving some environmental policies open to influence by protectionist motives. As many legality issues have yet to be disputed and resolved, opportunities exist to help the WTO and environmental institutions evolve in ways to enable and encourage good policymaking.

Suggested Citation

  • Fischer, Carolyn & Hoffmann, Sandra & Yoshino , Yutaka, 2002. "Multilateral Trade Agreements and Market-Based Environmental Policies," RFF Working Paper Series dp-02-28, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-02-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-02-28.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James Poterba & Julio Rotemberg, 1995. "Environmental taxes on intermediate and final goods when both can be imported," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 2(2), pages 221-228, August.
    2. Fischer, Carolyn & Kerr, Suzi & Toman, Michael, 1998. "Using Emissions Trading to Regulate U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: An Overview of Policy Design and Implementation Issues," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 51(3), pages 453-464, September.
    3. Pearson,Charles S., 2000. "Economics and the Global Environment," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521779883.
    4. Kyle Bagwell & Robert W. Staiger, 2001. "The WTO as a Mechanism for Securing Market Access Property Rights: Implications for Global Labor and Environmental Issues," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 69-88, Summer.
    5. Fischer, Carolyn, 2001. "Rebating Environmental Policy Revenues: Output-Based Allocations and Tradable Performance Standards," Discussion Papers 10709, Resources for the Future.
    6. Josh Ederington & Jenny Minier, 2003. "Is environmental policy a secondary trade barrier? An empirical analysis," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 36(1), pages 137-154, February.
    7. Jeffrey A. Frankel & Andrew K. Rose, 2005. "Is Trade Good or Bad for the Environment? Sorting Out the Causality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(1), pages 85-91, February.
    8. Bernard, Alain & Fischer, Carolyn & Vielle, Marc, 2001. "Is There a Rationale for Rebating Environmental Levies?," Discussion Papers 10512, Resources for the Future.
    9. Josh Ederington, 2001. "International Coordination of Trade and Domestic Policies," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(5), pages 1580-1593, December.
    10. Lucas, Robert E.B. & Wheeler, David & Hettige, Hemamala, 1992. "Economic development, environmental regulation, and the international migration of toxic industrial pollution : 1960-88," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1062, The World Bank.
    11. Pearson,Charles S., 2000. "Economics and the Global Environment," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521770026.
    12. James A. Tobey, 1990. "The Effects of Domestic Environmental Policies on Patterns of World Trade: An Empirical Test," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(2), pages 191-209, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Fischer, Carolyn & Fox, Alan, 2004. "Output-Based Allocations of Emissions Permits: Efficiency and Distributional Effects in a General Equilibrium Setting with Taxes and Trade," RFF Working Paper Series dp-04-37, Resources for the Future.
    2. Ferrara, Ida & Missios, Paul & Murat Yildiz, Halis, 2009. "Trading rules and the environment: Does equal treatment lead to a cleaner world?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 206-225, September.
    3. Lin, Boqiang & Li, Aijun, 2011. "Impacts of carbon motivated border tax adjustments on competitiveness across regions in China," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 36(8), pages 5111-5118.
    4. Carolyn Fischer, 2003. "Combining rate-based and cap-and-trade emissions policies," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(sup2), pages 89-103, December.
    5. Fischer, Carolyn & Fox, Alan K., 2009. "Comparing Policies to Combat Emissions Leakage: Border Tax Adjustments versus Rebates," RFF Working Paper Series dp-09-02, Resources for the Future.
    6. Li, Aijun & Zhang, Aizhen, 2012. "Will carbon motivated border tax adjustments function as a threat?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 81-90.
    7. de Coninck, Heleen & Fischer, Carolyn & Newell, Richard G. & Ueno, Takahiro, 2008. "International technology-oriented agreements to address climate change," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 335-356, January.
    8. Carolyn Fischer & Alan K. Fox, 2007. "Output-Based Allocation of Emissions Permits for Mitigating Tax and Trade Interactions," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 83(4), pages 575-599.
    9. Missios, Paul & Yildiz, Halis Murat, 2006. "The role of MFN under asymmetries in environmental standards," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 93(2), pages 297-304, November.
    10. Li, Aijun & Zhang, Aizhen & Cai, Hongbo & Li, Xingfeng & Peng, Shishen, 2013. "How large are the impacts of carbon-motivated border tax adjustments on China and how to mitigate them?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 927-934.
    11. Fischer, Carolyn & Fox, Alan K., 2012. "Comparing policies to combat emissions leakage: Border carbon adjustments versus rebates," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 199-216.
    12. Doerr, Eva Maria, 2012. "Wandel oder Kontinuität: Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Diskussion um handelsrestriktive Umweltmaßnahmen im Rahmen der WTO," PIPE - Papers on International Political Economy 12/2012, Free University Berlin, Center for International Political Economy.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mahvash Saeed Qureshi, 2006. "Trade Liberalization, Environment and Poverty: A Developing Country Perspective," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2006-45, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    2. Tang, John P., 2015. "Pollution havens and the trade in toxic chemicals: Evidence from U.S. trade flows," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 150-160.
    3. Moinul Islam & Keiichiro Kanemoto & Shunsuke Managi, 2016. "Impact of Trade Openness and Sector Trade on Embodied Greenhouse Gases Emissions and Air Pollutants," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Yale University, vol. 20(3), pages 494-505, June.
    4. Dhimitri Qirjo & Razvan Pascalau, 2019. "The Role of TTIP on the Environment," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 85(4), pages 1262-1285, April.
    5. Honma, Satoshi & Yoshida, Yushi, 2020. "An empirical investigation of the balance of embodied emission in trade: Industry structure and emission abatement," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 277-294.
    6. Honma, Satoshi & Yoshida, Yushi, 2014. "An Account of Pollution Emission Embodied in Global Trade: PGT1 and PGT2 Database," MPRA Paper 57489, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Cramton, Peter & Kerr, Suzi, 2002. "Tradeable carbon permit auctions: How and why to auction not grandfather," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 333-345, March.
    8. Suárez-Varela, Marta & Rodríguez-Crespo, Ernesto, 2022. "Is dirty trade concentrating in more polluting countries? Evidence from Africa," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 728-744.
    9. Tang, John P., 2015. "Pollution havens and the trade in toxic chemicals: Evidence from U.S. trade flows," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 150-160.
    10. Yushi Yoshida & Satoshi Honma, 2011. "Did International Trade Become Dirtier in Developing Countries? On the Composition Effect of International Trade on the Environment," Discussion Papers 52, Kyushu Sangyo University, Faculty of Economics.
    11. Brian R. Copeland & M. Scott Taylor, 2004. "Trade, Growth, and the Environment," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 42(1), pages 7-71, March.
    12. Jean-Marie Grether & Nicole Andréa Mathys & Jaime de Melo, 2015. "Unravelling the Worldwide Pollution Haven Effect," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Developing Countries in the World Economy, chapter 23, pages 581-612, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    13. Cole, Matthew A. & Elliott, Robert J.R. & Shimamoto, Kenichi, 2005. "Why the grass is not always greener: the competing effects of environmental regulations and factor intensities on US specialization," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(1), pages 95-109, July.
    14. Sevil Acar & Ahmet Atil Asici, 2015. "Does Income Growth Relocate Ecological Footprint?," Working Papers 938, Economic Research Forum, revised Sep 2015.
    15. Timothy P. Hubbard, 2014. "Trade and transboundary pollution: quantifying the effects of trade liberalization on CO 2 emissions," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(5), pages 483-502, February.
    16. Frankel, Jeffrey, 2008. "Global Environmental Policy and Global Trade Policy," Working Paper Series rwp08-058, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    17. McCorriston, Steve & Sheldon, Ian M., 2002. "The Non-Neutrality Of Wto Border Tax Adjustments For Environmental Excise Taxes Under Imperfect Competition," 2002 Annual meeting, July 28-31, Long Beach, CA 19673, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    18. Frankel, Jeffrey A., 2009. "Environmental Effects of International Trade," Scholarly Articles 4481652, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
    19. M A Cole & R J R Elliott & K Shimamoto, 2003. "US Specialization in Pollution-Intensive Industries: Factor Intensities versus Environmental Regulations," Economics Discussion Paper Series 0321, Economics, The University of Manchester.
    20. Emilio Gutierrez & Kensuke Teshima, 2011. "Import Competition and Environmental Performance: Evidence from Mexican Plant-level and Satellite Imagery Data," Working Papers 1101, Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    trade; environment; WTO; GATT; market-based policies;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F1 - International Economics - - Trade
    • Q38 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Government Policy (includes OPEC Policy)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:rff:dpaper:dp-02-28. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Resources for the Future (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rffffus.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.