Bigger, Not Cleaner! Another Look at the Trade-Environment

Evangelina Dardati and Meryem Saygili
Additional contact information
Meryem Saygili: Department of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Tyler

ILADES-UAH Working Papers from Universidad Alberto Hurtado/School of Economics and Business

Abstract: In this paper, we use microdata from Chile to examine the relationship between export status and the environmental performance of firms. We proxy environmental performance by measures of emission intensity. We find that the correlation between export status and emission intensity depends on how the latter is measured. In particular, we find that export status is negatively correlated with emission intensity when we define emission intensity as emissions over sales, but it is uncorrelated when we use value added instead of sales. The difference between those two variables is that value added excludes the value of materials that the firm gets from other sources (outsourcing). Those intermediate inputs entail emissions that do not belong to the firm. Our data show that outsourcing is positively correlated with export status. Thus, using sales as an output measure overestimates firm activity, and, hence, exporters look cleaner than they actually are. We show, more formally, why the distinction between sales and value added is important, using a simple firm-level emission decomposition.

Keywords: Emission intensity; export status; foreign ownership; productivity; outsourcing. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://fen.uahurtado.cl/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/doc-inv332junio2019.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ila:ilades:inv332

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ILADES-UAH Working Papers from Universidad Alberto Hurtado/School of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mauricio Tejada ().