آزاد سازی تجاری و اثرات آن بر تولید گازهای گلخانه ای آلوده کننده برای هوا و ذخایر زباله های جامد. ارزیابی تعادل عمومی برای نروژ

This paper assesses the effects of the last decade's multinational liberalisation of foreign trade, in terms of economic gains and in terms of emissions to air and deposits of solid waste. By means of a disaggregated intertemporal CGE model for Norway two scenarios with and without the trade reforms are compared. Despite a slight decrease in GDP, emissions of several pollutants rise significantly. This is partly attributable to a modest increase in aggregate welfare, as polluting consumption rises along with reduced labour effort. Further, the trade reforms, in combination with existing policy concessions, result in a long-run structural change in favour of heavy-polluting export industries. As these are large consumers of electricity, prices of clean hydropower rise and cause an economy-wide substitution towards more pollutive energy sources.

The last decade has witnessed a strong increase in the degree of regional and global economic integration. This has been motivated by the mutual national gains from stronger specialisation of the production structure according to comparative advantage and scale economies, stronger competition, and access to a richer menu of goods. Simultaneously, there has been a growing awareness of the potential environmental consequences of trade liberalisation. The scientific literature also reflects a revitalisation of these issues, starting in the early 1990s, see e.g. Whalley (1991), Grossman and Krueger (1993), Perroni and Wigle (1994) and Copeland and Taylor (1994). From a national point of view, the relationship between environmental pressure and growth from trade is ambiguous. First, direct effects on environmental pressure will come through scale and composition effects in domestic production and consumption. The numerous contributions to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) literature,1 connecting the development of environmental quality to growth, throw light on these effects. The EKC literature also emphasises that economic growth may stimulate environmental policies and technology innovations because the demand for environmental goods and regulatory policy is income elastic. In a world of freer trade, however, incentives may well pull in the other direction, e.g. through initialising a race to the bottom of environmental standards or by limiting the scope of national policy instruments. Clear and robust policy implications are even less likely in cases where environmental damage spills across borders. Multilateral arrangements are then required to ensure abatement policies. This study addresses both economic and environmental implications for Norway of three multinational trade agreements of the last decade: the European Economic Area Agreement (EEA); the EFTA Resolution on Fisheries, both in force from 1994; and the WTO Agreement from 1995. The resulting reforms of tariffs, non-tariff barriers and governmental aid imply new domestic and world market conditions for Norwegian agents. Environmental effects considered in this study include changes in air emissions and deposits of solid waste, which are either locally harmful or affect the government's ability to fulfil international commitments on transboundary pollution. We apply a dynamic and disaggregated CGE model for Norway to compare a simulated trade reform path with a business-as-usual reference scenario. We isolate the effects of implementing the trade reforms; no simultaneous growth effects from technological or demographic changes are considered. The model allows us to quantify changes in an aggregate welfare index and other macroeconomic aggregates, as well as detailed composition adjustments within production, factor input and consumption. As in most other comparable trade policy studies,2 the simulated macroeconomic effects are small; while GDP is slightly reduced in the long run, aggregate consumption increases by 1.0%. Nevertheless, the increases in emissions of several gases are stronger, as can be explained by composition effects. A structural change in favour of manufacturing industries is the main reason why pollution of Sulfur Dioxide and Suspended Particulates increases by more than 1%, while long-run increases also occur in emissions of Carbon Monoxide and Kyoto gases. In addition to being heavy polluters, the manufacturing industries that expand in the long run, are hydropower intensive. Thus, their expansion causes a rise in the relative price of electricity that brings about a more fuel-based composition of energy use throughout the economy. Some emissions fall, primarily those associated with agricultural production. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents a brief non-technical overview of the structure of the applied model. Section 3 describes the exogenous changes associated with the trade liberalisation. Section 4 explains the macroeconomic changes, while Section 5 sums up scale and composition effects on emissions to air and solid waste generation. Section 6 provides a sensitivity discussion on important assumptions. Section 7 concludes.

Our general equilibrium assessment of the consequences for Norway of the recent international agreements on trade indicates that most effects will be small compared to the changes that will take place during a normal growth process. However, even a modest gain equal to 0.8% in an aggregate welfare index of consumption and leisure cannot be realised without increased air pollution from Norwegian sources. We find that the total emissions of Kyoto gases increase by 0.4% in the long run. As a reference, Norway has to confine the growth in greenhouse gas emissions to 1%, only, from 1990 to the period 2008–2012, according to the Kyoto protocol. Consequently, our findings on the isolated effects of the trade reform suggest that Norway reduces the scope for fulfilling the Kyoto commitments by 40%. 18 Moreover, emissions of Sulfur Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide and Suspended Particulates increase by between 1 and 2%. Only emissions of Ammonia show a significant reduction, of 2.7%. The rise in the emissions of air pollutants occurs despite a reduction in GDP. Foremost, this result reflects that most of the economic welfare gain can be attributed to improved terms of trade. Thus, while domestic production is scaled down, consumption and emissions from consumption rise. In addition, the restructuring of the economy implies reallocations in the long run in favour of export-oriented industries. Their production is ‘dirty’ and their consumption of electricity implies scarcity of ‘clean’ power and substitution in favour of fuels. The assumption of constant and similar technologies in the pre- and post-reform paths implies that there are no endogenous links between trade policy and technology. However, trade is a potential channel of technology diffusion. Also, to the extent that economic activities expand as trade reforms are undertaken one could expect some degree of embedded growth, as it would be rational to invest in the most efficient capital equipment available. Whether such improvements would benefit the environment, would depend on the existing incentives to invest in ‘cleaner’ technology. The reported negative effects on air pollution should not be used as an argument against trade liberalisation. The first-best policy would be to correct the direct sources of imperfections. This implies that more direct policy tools than trade policy instruments should be applied to control environmentally harmful activities. In this respect it is interesting that the heavy polluting, exporting manufactures are subject to favourable policy conditions in terms of low energy prices and low carbon taxes. Our model analysis leaves plenty of issues deserving further research. As soon as the state of the environmental statistics permits, a natural extension would be to integrate discharges to water and soil into the analysis. An interesting and more ambitious project would be to take the harmful feedback effects from emissions more explicitly into account when calculating changes in welfare. In particular, including environmental quality in the welfare function would give insight into the balancing between environmental and pure economic considerations. Introducing endogenous political actions or technology improvements would enable the model to grasp further aspects of the relationship between trade reforms, economic growth and the environment. Moreover, our analysis shows that the responses in the energy markets may affect air pollution. A better description of the possibilities of trading electricity internationally should therefore be a part of further research in this field.