Offshoring Pollution: Is the United States Increasingly Importing Polluting Goods&quest

Arik Levinson

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2010, vol. 4, issue 1, 63-83

Abstract: The question posed by the title of this article has been at the heart of debates about pollution havens, industrial flight to developing countries, and now carbon "leakage." Is the United States increasingly importing goods whose production generates relatively more pollution, rather than manufacturing those goods domestically? The consensus seems to be "yes," at least judging by the many public policies designed to counteract this offshoring of pollution. The evidence, however, is mixed, at least in part because empirical research has focused on a slightly different set of questions. After reviewing this research, I present a simple methodology for answering the specific question asked in the title. Using the World Bank's 1987 inventory of industry-specific U.S. air pollution emissions intensities, Bureau of Economic Analysis input--output tables, and data on U.S. imports, I show that from 1972 to 2001 the composition of U.S. imports shifted toward relatively clean goods, rather than polluting goods. Perhaps more surprising, this "green" shift of U.S. imports is even larger than the corresponding green shift of U.S. domestic manufacturing. Based on this analysis, the article concludes that over the past thirty years, the United States does not appear to have been offshoring pollution by importing polluting goods. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reep/rep017 (application/pdf)
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:oup:renvpo:v:4:y:2010:i:1:p:63-83

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy is currently edited by Robert Stavins

More articles in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy from Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().