تجارت بین الملل و سیاست های زیست محیطی: چقدر دامپینگ محیط زیست موثر است؟

This paper examines the effects of environmental regulations on the international competitiveness of domestic industries. A generalised GDP function, which incorporates both technology changes and increasing returns to scale is set up and a flexible translog function form is used to approximate this GDP function. A seemingly unrelated regression estimation technique is employed to estimate a system of sectoral share equations derived from the generalised GDP function. The basic hypothesis is that while the environmental factor is not a significant determinant of the international competitiveness of environmentally sensitive industries, technology is. The result supports this hypothesis and suggests that so-called eco-dumping is not an effective strategy in this context.

A country is regarded as engaging in ‘ecological-dumping’,2 or ‘eco-dumping’ when it gains international competitiveness in environmentally sensitive industries (ESG) by imposing relatively lax environmental standards on the production of a good. More precisely, ‘eco-dumping’ can be defined as a policy which ‘prices environmentally harmful activities at less than the marginal cost of environmental degradations, i.e. a policy which does not internalise all environmental externalities’ (Rauscher, 1994). ‘Eco-dumping’ and its counterpart, anti-dumping, have emerged as new issues threatening the trade liberalisation agenda of the World Trade Organisation. As trade and environment concerns become increasingly evident, there is a resurgence of calls for a ‘level playing field’, ‘harmonisation of environmental standards’ and ‘fair trade’ and fears of loss of international competitiveness in environmentally sensitive industries on the part of developed countries in the 1990s. Developing countries, on the other hand, see these calls as new protectionism, in the form of hidden non-tariff barriers and problems of market access (Dua and Esty, 1997). An even more important issue facing developing countries is that of development strategy. Is there a conflict between environmental standards and international competitiveness? Do developing countries need to sacrifice their hopes for economic development, or, more narrowly, international competitiveness in the interests of higher environmental standards?3 Is it a question of economic development (or the international competitiveness of ESG industries) vs. environmental standards or is it rather a question of economic development taking environmental standards into account? The literature features a number of normative analyses (Anderson and Blackhurst, 1992, Barrett, 1994, Chichilnisky, 1994, Esty, 1994, Porter and van der Linde, 1995, Bhagwati and Hudec, 1996, Brander and Taylor, 1997, Dua and Esty, 1997 and Markusen, 1997, among others).4 However, there is a lack of further empirical analysis, as pointed out in a 1995 report to the OECD Council at the ministerial level: ‘the next stage of the OECDs work programme should include empirical analysis of selected policy areas and economic sectors’ (OECD, 1995). This paper ties in with the literature on trade liberalisation and environmental policy from an empirical perspective. It aims to investigate the effectiveness, if any, of ‘eco-dumping’ on the international competitiveness of environmentally sensitive industries. It seeks to examine whether the introduction of stringent environmental policies will lead to the decline of ESG industries. To this end, a generalised GDP function, which incorporates both technology change and increasing returns to scale, is set up and a flexible translog function form is used to approximate this generalised GDP function. A seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) technique is used to estimate a system of sectoral share equations derived from the generalised GDP function. Environmental stringency is treated as a factor of production together with capital, labour, land, mineral, oil and coal endowments. The technology level is regarded as an important determinant in sectoral share production. The basic hypothesis is that while the environmental factor is not a significant determinant of international competitiveness of environmentally sensitive industries, technology is. This paper is organised as follows. The generalised GDP function is derived in the next section. A flexible translog function form is set up to approximate the generalised GDP function in section 3. Section 4 discusses data and measurement issues. Section 5 reports the econometric results and the robustness of the test. The final section presents some conclusions.

There are growing concerns about loss of international competitiveness and impediments to economic development due to environmental regulations from developing countries. Concerns on the part of developed countries about eco-dumping from developing countries with lax environmental policies have also become important in debates on trade and environment. This paper tries to investigate, econometrically, the effectiveness, if any, of ‘eco-dumping’ on the international competitiveness of environmentally sensitive industries. A generalised GDP function, which incorporates both technology change and increasing returns to scale, is set up and a flexible translog function form is used to approximate this generalised GDP function. A seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) technique is used to estimate a system of sectoral share equations derived from the generalised GDP function. Environmental stringency is treated as a factor of production together with capital, land, labour, mineral, oil and coal endowments. Technology level is regarded as an important determinant in the sectoral share production. The basic hypothesis is that while the environmental factor is not a significant determinant of the international competitiveness of environmentally sensitive industries, technology is. The econometric results suggest that the own-technology effects are all positive, as suggested by theory, and statistically significant at the 5% level in most cases. However, the environmental stringency variable has only a negligible effect and is shown to be not statistically significant in all sectors. This suggests that countries with less stringent environmental policies are not necessarily associated with higher sectoral share of ESGs. While trade is not explicitly addressed, the implications for trade are immediately apparent: to the extent that countries have similar tastes, the inferences about the determinants of production pattern found here will translate into inferences about the country’s trade pattern (Harrigan, 1997). This finding confirms the recent empirical evidence suggested by Xu (1998) using data on trade patterns and Levinson (1996) using firm-level data. The policy implications are clear. On the one hand, these findings suggest that development strategies that rely on lax environmental regulations to achieve economic goals for developing countries may not be appropriate since dynamic comparative advantage may be more relevant in the international trade arena. There may be a compromise between environmental standards and international competitiveness. The appropriate development strategy for a developing country, therefore, is one of economic development that takes environmental standards into account rather than economic development based on lax environmental standards. On the other hand, the developed world’s fear of eco-dumping by developing countries has little credibility in the light of this test. The call for harmonisation of national environmental standards may not be justified, even from an empirical perspective.