Pollution Policy and Trade Liberalization of Environmental Goods

Alain-Désiré Nimubona ()

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2012, vol. 53, issue 3, 323-346

Abstract: During the Doha Round at the World Trade Organization, reductions in trade barriers on environmental goods (EG) were put forward as a means of helping developed and developing countries alike deal with current environmental problems. We examine the potential effectiveness of such a strategy in a developing country that imports all its consumption of EG from an imperfectly competitive foreign eco-industry. We point out that trade liberalization of EG might in fact lead to less stringent pollution taxes, which can result in an actual rise in pollution levels. We then show that the environmental effectiveness objective of this trade reform can be achieved when the regulator uses quantitative abatement standards as an alternative pollution policy instrument. However, this environmental achievement comes at the expense of social welfare. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Keywords: Eco-industry; Environmental goods; Environmental regulation; Trade and environment; Trade liberalization; F12; F18; H23; Q58 (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://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10640-012-9564-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:enreec:v:53:y:2012:i:3:p:323-346

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-012-9564-4

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().