Women in parliament make economies and international trade cleaner

Forest product trade plays an important role in the development of the Chinese forest industry. The trading value of forest product has shown a yearly growth rate of 12% during the last five recent years. Stringent environmental regulations in China have a profound impact on raw material supplies and industrial production in the forest sector; however, their impact on the forest product trade is still unclear. This study applies fixed and random effects models as well as a seemingly unrelated regression model to investigate the impact of environmental regulations on the trade of forest product from 2002 to 2015. The results indicate that the stringent environmental regulations promoted the import but restricted the export of forest product in general. Specifically, the stringent environmental regulations stimulated the import but had an ambiguous impact on the export of the paper product. The stringent environmental regulations had also stimulated the import of wood product but inhibited the export. In contrast, wooden furniture had been affected minimally; only export got slightly negatively affected by environmental regulations.Recommendations for resource managers: Trade‐offs between economic growth and environmental regulations are needed to smoothly promote the forest product trade in China. Paper and wooden furniture product sectors are less likely to be affected by stringent environmental regulations, because high value‐added products could compensate for environmental costs. The wood product sector is more likely to be negatively affected by stringent environmental regulations because environmental costs could severely impact the competitiveness of low value‐added products.

Does environmental regulation spur innovation? Quasi-natural experiment in China

The effect of environmental regulation on external trade: empirical evidences from Chinese economy

Pathways to China's Carbon Neutrality and Clean Energy Transition: Evidence from the Three Decades Long Stricter Environmental regulations

With the widespread adoption of green and low-carbon development concepts globally, economic growth has also been imbued with more elements of green development. Thus, the environment protection factors take more and more important role in the evaluation system of foreign investments all around the world, which raise the question of whether and how the escalating environmental regulations of host countries can affect Outward FDI (OFDI). Using a uniquely merged dataset of Chinese firm-level OFDI and country-level environmental regulations data over the sample period 2009–2019, this paper investigates the impact of host countries’ environmental regulations on Chinese OFDI from both host countries’ and multinational enterprises’ perspectives, and adds evidence from developing countries with weaker regulations to the 'pollution haven theory'.The conclusions show that Chinese multinational corporations are easily attracted by lax environmental regulations in alternative countries when choosing overseas locations, while strict environmental regulations in host countries reduce the investment probability of Chinese multinational corporations . Overall, the 'pollution haven effect' exists in the process of Chinese enterprises' overseas investment location choice, and several robustness checks confirm our findings. Heterogeneous tests indicate that non-OECD countries are more likely to become pollution havens than OECD countries who have more stringent environmental regulations. Mechanism analysis indicates that the natural resource rent of each country could moderate the impact of host countries’ environmental regulations on Chinese OFDI. Implications for both policy and managerial decision-making are also discussed.

Environmental regulations and international trade: A quantitative economic analysis of world pollution emissions

ABSTRACTDuring the last three decades, aquaculture has been the fastest growing animal-food-producing sector in the world, accounting for half of the present seafood supply. However, there is a significant growth disparity among aquaculture-producing countries. The reasons why some countries have achieved remarkable growth in aquaculture while others have stagnated or even declined have not been determined. In this article, we investigate whether environmental regulations have an impact on aquaculture growth. Using a cross-country regression analysis, we show that stringent environmental regulations are negatively related to aquaculture growth, whereas GDP growth has a positive effect. Countries often face a difficult balancing act between growth and environmental considerations when devising regulations. Our empirical results suggest that stricter environmental regulations in developed countries have contributed to lower growth rates and that these countries are falling behind emerging and developing economies that have more lenient environmental regulations.

Based on the unique micro-data of newly built polluting firms for the period of 2009–2018, this paper adopts the conditional logit model to empirically evaluate the impact of environmental regulations on the location choice of polluting firms. Moreover, we extend the theoretical model by considering that the environment regulations not only influence the pollution cost but also the level of technological innovation and labor cost. The empirical results show that polluting firms tend to flow into areas with stringent environmental regulations, which supports the Porter hypothesis, but the effect of environmental regulations have a divergent impact on heavily polluting firms. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that environmental regulations have shown a positive impact on the location choice of private and foreign-funded firms but no significant impact on that of state-owned firms; the impact of environmental regulation is consistent with pollution haven hypothesis for firms in the central region but is in line with Porter hypothesis for firms in other regions. Meanwhile, the probability of air polluting firms entering areas with stricter environmental regulations is higher than that of water-polluting ones. Finally, this paper further empirically tests the conduction mechanism, that is, environmental regulations can affect the location choice of polluting firms by affecting the regional technological innovation capabilities and labor cost.

Environmental regulation and innovation: Evidence from China

Suresh Narayanan: This paper tests the waste haven hypothesis (WHH), which examines the exporting of physical waste materials from countries with stringent environmental regulations to countries where such regulations are lax. The paper focuses on Japan as the exporter of waste and 31 Asian and developed countries as the potential importers of wastes—by implication nations with lax environmental regulations. The paper limits itself to four recyclable resource materials.This version is a much improved one, with the authors having incorporated many of the earlier suggestions. The paper now discusses more explicitly the gains of both developing countries and Japan from the trade in waste. The authors’ data on the regulation index has improved and, more importantly, they find that the regulation gap (the differences in environmental regulations between Japan and the countries that import waste) significantly affects the waste trade. In other words, they contend that their findings now support the WHH that Japan exports waste to countries with less stringent environmental regulations. It is worth noting that the previous version did not.I am still unclear if the predictions the authors set out to test (“high-GDP countries with high wage rates will export to low-GDP countries with low wage rates that have lax regulations and are not too far away”) actually come out of the WHH framework. The better known pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) suggests that highly polluting firms in developed countries with stringent environmental regulations will redirect investment or relocate to countries with the lowest environmental standards or weakest enforcement. This suggests three testable propositions:The WHH as advanced by Kellenberg (2012) differs from the PHH only in the sense that it refers to exports of physical waste rather than the relocation of polluting industries to countries with lax environmental regulations. Are the predictions that the authors set out to test the equivalent testable propositions from the WHH? Despite a better discussion of the WHH in this version, this point is not any clearer. According to D’Amato Mazzanti, and Montini (2013), Kellenberg stressed the importance of structural (population density), market price (gate fees), and technology/capacity as well as regulatory stringency and enforcement in influencing the waste trade. How do the predictions outlined by the authors tie in with the factors outlined by Kellenberg? Distance, for example, received no mention in the WHH.The empirical findings of the authors indicate that countries with a higher GDP, lower per capita income, and location near Japan were more likely to import waste from Japan. Furthermore, high-quality waste was more likely to be exported because of the difficulty of recycling low-quality waste. Finally, their findings suggest that importing countries that implemented stringent environmental regulations were less likely to import waste products.It puzzles me that the authors were only concerned with the sign and significance of the coefficients. Granted, the model might have issues of specification, data, and measurement errors. Despite these limitations, the authors have gone ahead with their estimates. Therefore, they should not have stopped at presenting just the estimated coefficients, which offer no direct interpretation. It would have been more meaningful to present the associated probabilities as well, with the caveat that they are indicative rather than conclusive.Of the variables influencing the waste trade, only environmental regulation serves as a direct policy handle that can be manipulated, if necessary. But this does not necessarily mean that it should be. Therefore, I found it surprising that the authors recommend that all Asian countries should impose substantial tariff rates uniformly on all types of waste to reduce waste export. This is a curious suggestion to make, especially because the authors had argued earlier that lower income countries have some advantages from engaging in the waste trade. Why would they want to restrict a trade that they were benefiting from?Perhaps the policy prescription, if any, that might be made on the basis of their finding is that low income countries should re-evaluate their costs and benefits from engaging in this trade to ensure that they import only waste that they can handle without putting their recycling workers or the environment at risk. Environmental regulations can then be tightened to ensure that hazardous waste is kept out and only safe wastes are imported.The authors make two other useful suggestions. First, countries engaging in exporting waste should inspect it to ensure that only clean and nontoxic recyclables are distributed. Second, importing countries should ensure that they have recycling facilities with environmentally sound technology to handle the waste. Neither of these insights, however, comes directly from the findings of the study.

The progressive processes of globalisation, integration and liberalisation of economies are the reason for which the competitiveness of economic entities is increasingly analysed in the context of their links with the international market. One of the ways to assess competitiveness is to analyse the comparative (relative) advantage in trade in products of a given economic sector. The objective of the article is to assess the comparative advantage in Polish foreign trade in food and non-food products, both in total Polish trade and with European Union Member States. The studies used the RTA relative trade advantage index. The data source was the WITS-Comtrade commercial database. The studies show that, in the years 2004-2017, there was a rapid development of Polish foreign trade in food products, in particular with the EU, resulting in a high trade surplus. Trade in non-food products grew more slowly, and the trade balance was negative. It is shown that Poland had a comparative advantage and was competitive on the world market (also on the EU market) in trade in these products, but did not have such an advantage in total trade in non-food products. The results obtained indicate international competitiveness of the Polish food sector and its large importance for national trade and payment balance.

Environmental regulation may represent a relevant mechanism through which technological change is induced. In this way, countries that are subject to more stringent environmental regulations may become net exporters of environmental technologies. This paper provides new evidence on the evolution of trade flows of specific environmental technologies for the energy sector, related to the production of renewable energies and more efficient standards of energy saving. The European Union (EU) has increasingly focused on the role of energy policies as tools for sustaining the development path, but, at the same time, as instruments for reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions. The Kyoto protocol commitments, together with growing concerns about energy security, have brought attention to the analysis of innovation processes in this specific sector. This paper uses a gravity model in order to test the determinants and the transmission channels through which environmental technologies for renewable energies and energy efficiency are exported from the EU members to advanced and developing countries. Our results are consistent with the Porter and van der Linde hypothesis where environmental regulation represents a significant source of comparative advantages.

This paper empirically evaluates the impact of environment stringency policy, business regulations, policy and economic uncertainty, and real GDP per capita on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows by employing the autoregressive distributed lag approach and using data from 2000 to 2015. Specifically, we focus on two groups of countries with different economic development, the Group of Seven (G7) and the BRICS countries, and the composite indices of business and environmental regulations and policy-induced uncertainty, along with real gross domestic capital (GDP) per capita, were selected to reflect the multidimensionality of the settings in the selected countries. Our results indicate that only the effect of real GDP per capita turned out to be homogenous and statistically significant across different income groups and time horizons. Findings also show that more friendly business regulations significantly encourage FDI inflows in the long run, but there is a bottom line. When regulations are already at a low level, as is the case with G7 countries, further liberalization would adversely affect FDI inflows. Furthermore, more stringent environmental regulations have a marginally adverse effect on FDI inflows only in the long run. At the same time, they weakly support the pollution haven hypothesis. The impact of policy-induced uncertainty on investment is adverse but largely nonsignificant in the short run. It appears that cross-border investments follow a pattern of the safe-haven effect to avoid uncertainty in the long run.

Is the impact of environmental regulations on the global value chains biased towards technological effects or refuge effects?

There are several compelling reasons to expect that gender equality may serve to foster state environmentalism. However, most previous research on environmental politics has neglected gender. To help further our understanding of the connection between gender and environmental politics, the authors empirically assess the association between the representation of women in national Parliament and environmental treaty ratification, using a large sample of nations. The findings indicate that nations with higher proportions of women in Parliament are more prone to ratify environmental treaties than are other nations. The results point to the importance of considering the role of gender in analyses of state behavior and environmental politics and are consistent with the argument of some feminist theorists that the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women are interconnected.