Environmental Regulation Induced Foreign Direct Investment

Robert Elliott (r.j.elliott@bham.ac.uk) and Ying Zhou

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between environmental regulations and international capital flows. However, empirical studies have so far failed to find conclusive evidence for this so-called pollution haven or race to the bottom effect where foreign direct investment (FDI) is assumed to be attracted to low regulation countries, regions or states. In this paper we present a simple theoretical framework to demonstrate that greater stringency in environmental standards can lead to a strategic increase in capital inflows which we refer to as environmental regulation induced FDI. Our result reveals a possible explanation for the mixed results in the empirical literature and provides an illustration of the conditions under which environmental regulations in the host country can affect the location decision of foreign firms.

Keywords: FDI; environmental regulations; pollution halo (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F2 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-int, nep-reg and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.cal.bham.ac.uk/pdf/13-08.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Environmental Regulation Induced Foreign Direct Investment (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:13-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oleksandr Talavera (o.talavera@bham.ac.uk).