Clean Trade Research Articles

Institutional quality, green trade and carbon emissions in sub-Saharan Africa

Studies focusing on reducing trade-related carbon footprint by consolidating institutional quality are not much in the literature. This study examines the role of institutional quality and green trade on carbon emissions. The empirical findings are based on generalised method of moments and 45 African countries spanning the period of 2008 to 2020. The initial findings revealed that institutional quality has a neutral impact on carbon emissions but trade openness increases it. However, strengthening institutional quality towards green trade reduces carbon emissions. Precisely, strengthening institutional quality towards green trade by 1% will have a joint effect of reducing carbon emissions by 0.04%. The policy implication is that clean trade can be achieved by strengthening the region's institutions which subsequently promote environmental sustainability.

Asymmetric impact of transportation on carbon emissions influencing SDGs of climate change

Transportation facilities have expanded globally because of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Transportation involves substantial use of energy therefore strongly linked with environmental pollution. This study intends to explore linkages among transport from air mode, combustible renewable energy and waste, GDP, energy use, oil prices, trade expansion, and carbon releases from airline transport. The data covered in the study ranged from 1971 to 2021. For the empirical analysis, the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) methodology has been applied in order to explore the asymmetric impact of the variables of interest. Prior to this, the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test is applied whose results demonstrate that variables included in the model contain mixed order of integration. The NARDL estimates show that the “positive shock to air transport and positive and negative shock to energy usage results in the increase of CO2 emissions per capita in the long run. While, a “positive (negative) shock” to renewable energy use and trade expansion reduces (increases) transport-related carbon discharge. The Error Correction Term (ECT) carries a negative sign implying a stability adjustment in the long run. These asymmetric components in our study can be employed in cost-benefit analysis and encompass the environmental repercussions (asymmetric) of government and management actions. The study suggests that the government of Pakistan should promote financing for renewable energy consumption and clean trade expansion to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) objective 13.

Exploring the Impact of Exports on Clean Energy Consumption in China: An Empirical Study

Understanding the influence of export volume in improving a country’s clean energy consumption requires a systematic search method to characterize the crucial role to ensure environmental sustainability. The present study employed an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach and vector error correction model (VECM), by using data from 1985-2018. The analysis revealed that in the long-run an increase in exports per capita and technological innovation can enhance clean energy consumption, and overcome environmental issues. Surprisingly, economic growth does not display significant effect. In the short run technological progress reduces clean energy consumption. The outcome of causality tests reveals a unidirectional from technological innovation to clean energy consumption in the short term. Along similar line, the results prove a feedback link among exports per capita and clean energy consumption, indicating that an increase in exports per capita is a core factor driving and improve energy use, among technological innovation and clean energy consumption, and among economic growth and clean energy consumption in the long run. To enhance clean energy and enable success in environmental improvement, policymakers in China should take proper initiatives to increase the clean trade, adjust the export pattern, and patent incentive technology, to ensure sustainable economic development.

Pooled samples and eDNA-based detection can facilitate the \u201cclean trade\u201d of aquatic animals

The regional and international trade of live animals facilitates the movement, spillover, and emergence of zoonotic and epizootic pathogens around the world. Detecting pathogens in trade is critical for preventing their continued movement and introduction, but screening a sufficient fraction to ensure rare infections are detected is simply infeasible for many taxa and settings because of the vast numbers of animals involved—hundreds of millions of live animals are imported into the U.S.A. alone every year. Batch processing pools of individual samples or using environmental DNA (eDNA)—the genetic material shed into an organism’s environment—collected from whole consignments of animals may substantially reduce the time and cost associated with pathogen surveillance. Both approaches, however, lack a framework with which to determine sampling requirements and interpret results. Here I present formulae for pooled individual samples (e.g,. swabs) and eDNA samples collected from finite populations and discuss key assumptions and considerations for their use with a focus on detecting Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, an emerging pathogen that threatens global salamander diversity. While empirical validation is key, these formulae illustrate the potential for eDNA-based detection in particular to reduce sample sizes and help bring clean trade into reach for a greater number of taxa, places, and contexts.

Getting to Yes: Lessons for a Transnational Activist

Leif Wenar argues, in Blood Oil, that the current rules governing natural resource exploitation by governments leaves too much room for the sale of a country’s natural resources in a manner which does not benefit its citizens. To that end, he proposes what he calls a Clean Trade Policy, under which individual developed states would pass laws forbidding the trade in resources where minimum standards for resource exploitation and sale are not met. In our paper, we first develop Wenar’s proposal, and then ask if it is possible for it to come to fruition. We theorize how activists interested in bringing about these changes might utilize the existing features of international law to adopt Wenar’s proposals. Beginning with Jessup’s theory of transnational law as a method of understanding the interaction of public, private, national and international legal regimes, and the process of norm creation and enforcement outside states, we argue that activists interested in taking up Wenar’s challenge to reform the ownership and distribution of global commodities would do well to move beyond Wenar’s narrow public law framework, and study the myriad forms of regulation and interactions that define the contemporary transformation of political sovereignty and rule-making under the conditions of globalization. We argue thatnonly by exploiting mechanisms of transnational lawmaking could the Clean Trade Policy be made law.

Modeling data backups as a batch-service queue with vacations and exhaustive policy

For data backup processes to cloud infrastructure, there is a clean trade off between backing up frequently (improving data safety) and reducing resource usage (power consumption and communication cost). With rapid growth of data storage requirements in recent years, we need to find the right balance between both objectives. To explicitly address this trade off, we model a wide set of exhaustive data backup processes as a general batch service queueing model with multiple vacations and probabilistic restarts.We study this queueing model and establish expressions for its performance measures such as system content and queue content distributions. This analysis aids in computing Quality of Service (QoS) measures of the data backup process such as the fraction of time the backup server is busy, the frequency of new connections and the age of the data at the beginning of a backup period. This enables us to quickly examine the dependence of QoS on the model parameters as well as to compute the optimal parameters in the backup process. We illustrate the latter by defining a particular cost function of a user and by framing an optimization problem.

European Union: Spearhead of the Environment Protection Movement

Abstract Industrialization laid the foundation for contemporary civilization but also begot environmental problems, which have been building up and remained unsolved to this day. There is widespread belief that, if industrial manufacturing lies at the root of environment degradation through endless spewing of residual waste, trade among nations is to blame for scattering residual waste the world over. Yet paradoxically, it is the very international trade that might be the ground for major remedies thereto. The 20th century witnessed the shift from free trade to fair trade; it is about time to shift from fair trade to clean trade. Nevertheless, such serious problems had barely been dealt with until the post-World War II period. An awareness-raising effort in this line was made by the European Union (EU) which, since the early 1970s, has been dealing with environmental and social issues, especially the ones deriving from international trade, in a decisive and responsible manner. Still, EU’s new policy in the field of environment protection has a downside in that it affects trade relations with partners from outside the Union, both developing and developed countries, thereby drawing fierce international reaction. The good part is that EU’s actions will most likely prompt other nations to follow suit.

WTO Law Aspects of Clean Trade

The Clean Trade project is designed to block the importation of natural resources that have been exploited in violation of the human right to permanent sovereignty over these natural resources (‘exploited resources’). To this end, the Clean Trade project envisages that states would impose a direct embargo on exploited resources, and would impose duties on products from intermediate states that import exploited resources. This note, written in the context of the Clean Trade Project, examines the WTO legality of these two mechanisms. It concludes that, most likely, these mechanisms are WTO-legal. In the event that they are not, this note also considers a third option, namely, a waiver from WTO obligations, along the lines of the waiver for the Kimberley Process for ‘conflict diamonds’.

Clean Trade in Natural Resources

The “resource curse” can strike countries that derive a large portion of their national income from exporting high-value natural resources, such as oil, gas, metals, and gems. Resource-exporting countries are subject to four overlapping curses: they are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil wars, and they exhibit greater economic instability.

The geography of US pollution intensive trade: evidence from 1958 to 1994

Over the last thirty years, the United States has experienced a reduction in the share of manufacturing workers, increased international trade in manufacturing, and rising environmental quality. One possible factor driving these three trends is increased imports of dirty goods from ‘pollution havens’. As the volume of world trade grows, the United States has the opportunity to consume goods that are not produced domestically. This paper uses US trade data from 1958 to 1994 to study trends in dirty and clean trade. Bilateral trade regressions results show that poorer, non-democratic nations are not US pollution havens. The pollution content of Africa’s exports to the US are much higher than other continents.

Part 1. The Nature of Corrosion and Its Control

Abstract* Part 1. The Nature of Corrosion and Its Control. Tanker vessels operated in salt water have developed serious bulkhead failures in 6 to 8 years of clean trade when frequent cleaning is re...