The curse of the haven: The impact of multinational enterprise on environmental regulation

Lammertjan Dam and Bert Scholtens

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 78, issue C, 148-156

Abstract: We analyze the behavior of multinational enterprises in the context of resource rich and poor countries and regarding high and low income countries. We depart from the pollution haven hypothesis and the resource curse. The pollution haven hypothesis states that multinational enterprises move their dirty operations to countries with weak environmental regulation. The resource curse holds that economic growth in countries abundant in natural resources is reduced. We find that more polluting firms are relatively more often located in countries with weak environmental regulation. However, multinational enterprises do not have a significant impact on environmental regulation in the host country. It appears that it is mainly the quality of institutions that drives both the pollution haven and the resource curse.

Keywords: Environmental responsibility; FDI; Resource curse; Institutional quality; Multinational enterprises; Pollution haven (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 L21 M14 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800912001413
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ecolec:v:78:y:2012:i:c:p:148-156

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.04.011

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().