Trade in the Telecoupling Framework

Abstract

As a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary sustainability challenges, telecoupling emphasises the importance of socioeconomic and environmental interactions over long distances. These long-distance interactions can occur through multiple human activities. Here we focus on international trade, a major channel of telecoupling flows, and in particular on the international trade of metals. We present a conceptual model to show how trade can be viewed through the telecoupling framework. We then use world input-output tables to quantitatively examine how countries contribute to both economic and environmental flows through trade of metals, but also how that contribution varies depending on their position in the global value chain of contemporary international trade. This analysis is built on recently-developed techniques for decomposing gross exports of physical products and embedded environmental assets as well as previous methods for valuing environmental assets. We make comparisons between countries' contributions to flows of economic value vs embedded greenhouse gas emissions, but also examine contributions beyond total volumes of trade and bilateral trade. Specifically, we quantify the economic and environmental ‘spillover’ effects that occur in contemporary international trade due to the global value chain in which flows of intermediate goods form components in other subsequently traded goods. We interpret differences between countries' contributions to the flows of economic value versus embedded environmental assets as being related to the intensity and efficiency of resource use during production. In turn, differences in contributions to direct trade flows versus spillover flows are related to their positions in the global value chain. Subsequently, we discuss other elements of the telecoupling framework in trade – agents, causes and effects. Quantitatively incorporating these telecoupling framework elements alongside spillover flows will enable investigation of dynamics and relationships that traditional trade theories, data and models do not currently account for well.