Trade, FDI, growth and biodiversity: an empirical analysis for the main OECD countries

Roberta de Santis ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Whether the Environmental Kutznets curve relationship holds for biodiversity or not remains an open issue. While there are several studies investigating the EKC relationship for biodiversity, they suffer from some limitations and the empirical evidence is inconclusive. More specifically, with few exceptions, the previous EKC studies for biodiversity looked into the diversity of a particular species or a number of species rather than a broader measure of biodiversity. In addition, these studies do not control for some economic factors that could directly or indirectly affect the biodiversity stock such as trade and foreign direct investments (FDI). International trade, in fact, could influence the biodiversity trough the effects on economic growth, production specialization and technological innovation diffusion. The presence or not of FDI in a country could be of help in assessing the “pollution haven” hypothesis that has obvious feedbacks on biodiversity. The innovative features of this paper are its attempts to estimate a ECK for biodiversity using an overall index of biodiversity terrestrial and marine and the inclusion in the traditional ECK equation of proxies for trade and FDI. According to our estimates for the main OECD countries in the period 1990-2010, the ECK hypothesis is partially verified. Rising incomes are first associated with increasing biodiversity then with decreasing biodiversity and eventually with increasing biodiversity again. This non-monotonic relationship could be explained by the fact that a certain level of income (production) there may be some biodiversity losses that cannot be continuously substituted with environmental-friendly production technology due to ecological threshold and the unique nature of the damage.

Keywords: Biodiversity risk; Trade; FDI; Environmental Kuznets curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F18 O11 Q32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/37730/1/MPRA_paper_37730.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/40106/1/MPRA_paper_40106.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:37730

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().