New Empirical Evidence for the Impact of Trade and Economic Growth on the Environment

Awudu Abdulai and Linda Ramcke

DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade

Abstract: This paper explores the interrelations between economic growth, international trade and environmental degradation both theoretically and empirically. Panel data from developed and developing countries for the period of 1980 to 2003 is used and previous critique, especially on the econometric specification, is embedded. In particular, it is not assumed that there is a single link for all countries. Several environmental factors and one sustainability indicator are analysed for the full sample, regions and income groups. The results indicate that there is an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for most pollutants, but with several reservations. None of the various hypotheses that concern the link between trade and environmental degradation can be entirely confirmed. If anything, there is modest support for the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH). In addition, there are signs that trade liberalisation might be beneficial to sustainable development for rich countries, but harmful to poor ones. However, a sustainable development path is particularly important for developing countries, as the poor are most exposed and vulnerable to the health and productivity losses associated with a degraded environment. As developing countries often do not have the means and capacities to set up the appropriate environmental policies, it is on developed countries to take the lead in addressing environmental degradation issues and assisting developing countries.

Keywords: sustainable development; Pollution Haven Hypothesis; Environmental Kuznets Curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 Pages
Date: 2008-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://degit.sam.sdu.dk/papers/degit_13/c013_022.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to degit.sam.sdu.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

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:deg:conpap:c013_022

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan Pedersen ().