is free trade in the interest of exporting countries when there is ecological dumping abstract given conditions of oligopolistic competition the coordinated ban of direct export promoting policies e g in the eu or by gatt increases the income of exporting countries however in the presence of environmental distortions free trade can lead to ecological dumping in exporting countries the question arises if free trade is still in the interest of exporting countries we show that welfare maximizing governments of exporting countries prefer free trade even if countries subsidize their local industries indirectly via ecological dumping the existence of further national policy instruments does not make free trade agreements obsolete

international sourcing and supply chain stability an international supply chain is conceptualized as a complex dynamic system in which disruptions interact with long shipping and lead times to generate costs findings from a case study and simulation model indicate that demand related disruptions created substantial and unexpected costs in terms of expedited shipping high inventories and lower demand fulfillment production related disruptions declined over time but demand related disruptions did not implications for management are discussed

regulatory attitudes and environmental innovation in a model combining internal and external r d the extent to which environmental regulatory institutions are either green or brown impacts not just the intensity of regulation at any moment but also the incentives for the development of new pollution control technologies we set up a strategic model of r d in which a polluter can deploy technologies developed in house or license technologies developed by specialist outsiders an eco industry polluters exert r d effort and may even develop redundant technologies to improve the terms on which they procure technology from outside we find that while regulatory bias has an ambiguous impact on the best available technology strategic delegation to systematically biased regulators can improve social welfare

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

trade liberalization environmental policy and welfare we analyze how trade liberalization affects environmental policies in the context of bilateral trade and imperfect competition instead of looking at the strategic distortions that trade introduces in environmental policies the focus of most existing studies we analyze how these distortions change in the face of a bilateral reduction in tariffs the incentives to distort environmental protection may be reduced by this move as a consequence environmental policies may be more stringent also welfare is likely and for some instruments certain to increase

theoretical and empirical foundations of hipc debt sustainability targets this article traces the origins of hipc heavily indebted poor country debt sustainability targets these targets are interpreted as switching values below which countries are expected to avoid debt service problems but as such they do not take into account that countries encounter debt problems for a variety of reasons and at different levels of debt it is likely that the true switching value of the debt to export ratio of many hipcs lie below the present target regarding the fiscal window of the hipc initiative the lack of analytical basis for a 250 per cent target for the debt torevenue ratio is noted and the problems raised by the joint openness revenue condition are discussed the article concludes that the sustainability targets as presently applied are not well supported in analytical terms

pollution abatement subsidies and the eco industry this paper considers the combination of pollution taxes and abatement subsidies when some polluting firms procure their abatement goods and services from an oligopolistic eco industry the regulator must here cope with two simultaneous price distortions one that comes from pollution and the other which is caused by the eco industry s market power in this context we show that taxing emissions while subsidizing polluters abatement efforts cannot lead to first best but the opposite occurs provided it is the eco industry s output which is subsidized when public transfers also create distortions welfare can be higher if the regulator uses only an emission tax but subsidizing abatement suppliers while taxing emissions remains optimal when the eco industry is concentrated

low investment and large ldc debt in the 1980s this paper aims at disentangling the correlation between ldc debt and investment in the 1980s the author shows that a large debt was not an unconditional predictor of low investment in the 1980s nor was investment abnormally low when compared to a financial autarky rate calculated in the text he does find however that the actual service of the debt crowded out investment for the rescheduling countries he shows that 1 percent of gdp paid abroad reduced domestic investment by 0 3 percent of gdp this is identical to the correlation between investment and foreign finance observed in the 1960s copyright 1993 by american economic association

pollution policy and trade liberalization of environmental goods 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

vertical structure and strategic environmental trade policy abstract the idea that environmental trade policy can be used to achieve competitive advantage in international markets has important implications for the way we conceive free trade this paper considers strategic environmental policy in a model that makes explicit the vertical structure that supports production of the traded good including intranational vertical relationships in the analysis of strategic environmental trade policy has substantial qualitative effects when vertical contracts are allowed the optimal policy to levy on a polluting input under both quantity and price competition in the international market is the pigouvian tax

linking trade and external debt strategies abstract despite the productive inefficiencies generated by policies of export promotion and of import substitution such development strategies can improve welfare when used in conjunction with a debt strategy export promotion can increase the availability of foreign finance and import substitution can reduce debt service when the latter strategy is optimal partial debt forgiveness increases the creditor group s payoff import substitution is more profitable with a large inherited debt high world interest rate low terms of trade and when creditors fail to reduce inherited debt

trade in environmental goods evidences from an analysis using elasticities of trade costs negotiations on the liberalization of environmental goods egs and services within the wto doha round mandated in november 2001 are facing specific challenges conflicting interests and differing perceptions of the benefits of increased trade in egs were reflected in different approaches proposed for determining egs using import data of 34 organisation for economic co operation and development oecd member countries and from a sample of 167 countries from 1995 to 2012 we discuss the trade effect of reducing barriers on egs we analyze the lists of egs proposed by the asia pacific economic cooperation and oecd using a translog gravity model we found that removing tariff barriers for egs will have a modest impact because for the biggest importers and exporters elasticities of trade costs are very low while for most trading relationships they are very high making it difficult for exporters to maintain their markets overall our results suggest that because of their substantial effect on international trade future negotiations on egs should also address the issues of standards and nontariff barriers

environmental taxation and vertical cournot oligopolies how eco industries matter this article specifies what an optimal pollution tax should be when dealing with a vertical cournot oligopoly polluting firms sell final goods to consumers and outsource their abatement activities to an environment industry it is assumed that both markets are imperfectly competitive thus the tax is a single instrument used to regulate three sorts of distortions one negative externality and two restrictions in production consequently the optimal tax rate is the result of a trade off that depends on the firms market power along the vertical structure a detailed analysis of cournot nash equilibria in both markets is also performed in this context the efficiency of abatement activities plays a key role it gives a new understanding to the necessary conditions for the emergence of an eco industrial sector

taxes and subsidies for pollution intensive industries as trade policy abstract this paper constructs a model of international oligopoly with negative externalities in production in which optimal environmental policy responses to foreign emission tax and subsidy programs can be calculated it is shown that by granting subsidies for abatement efforts or for a heavily taxed polluting input domestic net welfare is improved by capturing a greater share of the world market since the subsidy programs are supposed to improve the quality of the global environment they can be justified on environmental grounds in addition we show that a pigouvion emission tax restores efficiency in natural resource allocation whereas subsidy programs are in principle used as instruments in imperfectly competitive international markets

strategic environmental policy clean technologies and the learning curve in the political discussion it is often emphasized that the environmental service industry which produces a clean factor of production benefits from an early and strong environmental policy this is especially likely if the costs of production are decreasing over time due to learning curve effects surprisingly the environmental service industry has not been integrated into the theory of strategic environmental policy yet our main question is whether a national leadership in environmental policy can pay off if profits of the environmental service industry are taken into account we consider a two period model with one firm in each country competing on a third market emissions can be substituted by the clean factor when deciding upon the production technology the unit costs of producing the clean factor in the second period are decreasing in the quantity produced in the initial period we derive the optimal environmental policy for both periods from a national point of view and show that the presence of the environmental service industry can indeed lead to a national leadership in pollution control

robust technology policy against emission leakage the case of upstream subsidies asymmetric regulation of a global pollutant between countries can alter the competitiveness of industries and lead to emissions leakage which hampers countries welfare in order to limit leakage governments consider supporting domestic trade exposed firms by subsidizing their investments in abatement technology the suppliers of such technologies tend to be less than perfectly competitive particularly when both emissions regulations and advanced technologies are new in this context of twin market failures we consider the relative effects and desirability of subsidies for abatement technology we find a more robust recommendation for upstream subsidies than for downstream subsidies downstream subsidies tend to increase global abatement technology prices reduce pollution abatement abroad and increase emission leakage on the contrary upstream subsidies reduce abatement technology prices and hence also emissions leakage

on capturing oil rents with a national excise tax this paper argues that since the supply of oil in the ground is inelastic the incidence of a sales tax on oil maintained forever at a fixed rate would fall entirely on the oil suppliers in the world economy however the elasticity of supply of oil to a single country depends on that country s imports as a share of world output and on the elasticity of demand for that country the paper calculates optimal tax rates for a country as a function of these variables and estimates optimal oil tax rates for the u s for some oecd countries separately and for the u s plus the oecd collectively current u s tax rates are shown to be far below optimal values

domestic taxes and the external debt laffer curve this paper highlights the role of the domestic tax system in determining the economic consequences of an external debt overhang the analysis indicates that fairly strong and probably unrealistic assumptions about the domestic tax system are needed to argue that the investment disincentives associated with the debt overlhang are large enough to place a country on the wrong side of the debt laffer curve a simple taxation scheme is specified and it is shown that a country can be on the wrong side of its debt laffer curve only if it is on the wrong side of its tax laffer curve

timing and commitment of environmental policy adoption of new technology and repercussions on r d we investigate the interplay between environmental policy incentives to adoptnew technology and repercussions on r d we study a model where a monopolistic upstream firm engages in r d and sells advanced abatement technology to polluting downstream firms we consider four different timing and commitment regimes of environmental tax and permit policies ex post taxation or issuing permits interim commitment to a tax rate a quota of permits after observing r d success but before adoption and finally two types of ex antecommitment before r d activity one with a unique tax rate quota of permits the other one with a menu of tax rates permit quotas we study the second best tax and permit policies and rank these with respect to welfare in particular we find that commitment to a menu of tax rate dominates all other policy regimes

the political economy linkage between trade liberalization and domestic environmental regulations this paper considers the political economy linkage between trade liberalization and domestic environmental regulations in a duopolistic product market we investigate the environmental consequences and welfare implications of a home country s unilateral tariff reduction on a polluting good in a framework where the domestic environmental tax is subject to the influence of the home firm we find that a tariff reduction on a good producing a consumption type externality will improve the home country s environmental quality moreover we find that the home country s tariff reduction will unambiguously enhance the home country s welfare and it will damage the foreign firm s profits and thus the foreign country s welfare provided that the weight that the home government attaches to its social welfare is sufficiently small this result also suggests the possibility that a unilateral tariff reduction will achieve a pareto improvement

interest groups trade liberalization and environmental standards in considering a country that imposes a minimum standard on an imported polluting good which generates negative consumption externalities we construct a common agency model in which a domestic environmental group and a foreign industrial lobby can influence the formation of the minimum standard by providing political contributions to the government this paper investigates the effects of trade liberalization on the political equilibrium environmental standard the pattern of trade environmental disutility and social welfare we find that trade liberalization tightens the minimum standard decreases imports of the polluting good and reduces environmental disutilities the importing country s social welfare however does not necessarily increase with trade liberalization the weaker the environmental group s lobbying efficiency or the stronger the foreign firm s lobbying efficiency the more likely it is that trade liberalization will enhance the importing country s welfare

on the best use of trade controls in the presence of foreign market power this paper derives optimum tariffs for a country whose trading partner always exploits its own market power but assumes naively that the home country will leave its restriction unchanged it then shows that a country which is a monopolist or monopsonist will always prefer its best price limit price floor or ceiling to its best tariff and prefer free trade to any quota however a duopsonist or duopolist will prefer its best quota to its best tariff and free trade to any price limit finally the best import or export tariff of a country which fears retaliation may be negative