The unobserved responses of individual polluters are often used to rationalize the aggregate effects of international trade on the environment. In this paper, I provide the first evidence of these ...responses. I estimate the effects of NAFTA on the emissions of particulate matter (PM10) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) from manufacturing plants in the United States. My findings suggest that trade liberalization led to significant reductions of these pollutants at affected plants. On average, nearly two-thirds of the reductions in PM10 and SO2 emissions from the U.S. manufacturing sector between 1994 and 1998 can be attributed to trade liberalization following NAFTA.
•I study the effects of NAFTA on the pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturing plants.•NAFTA significantly reduced emissions of PM10 and SO2.•Reductions are driven by within-plant responses to NAFTA.•My estimates suggest that trade played a key role in the clean-up of the U.S. manufacturing sector.
From Final Goods to Inputs Conconi, Paola; García-Santana, Manuel; Puccio, Laura ...
The American economic review,
08/2018, Letnik:
108, Številka:
8
Journal Article
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Odprti dostop
Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member ...countries from those originating from third countries. We focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the world’s largest FTA, and construct a unique dataset that allows us to map the input-output linkages in its RoO. Exploiting cross-product and cross-country variation in treatment over time, we show that NAFTA RoO led to a sizable reduction in imports of intermediate goods from third countries relative to NAFTA partners.
This current study provides new insight by presenting the role of natural resources and renewable energy use in affecting carbon emissions in the background of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) ...hypothesis for the members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) considering the period from 1990 to 2018. Besides, the analysis controls for the influx of FDI to assess the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis as well. The results unveil the existence of the EKC hypothesis by verifying an inverted U-shaped association between economic growth and carbon emissions, only in the long run. Besides, evidence regarding the environmental resource curse is also revealed as higher natural resource consumption is seen to trigger a higher discharge of carbon dioxide both in the short- and long-run. Moreover, only in the long-run, higher renewable energy consumption is associated with lower volumes of carbon emissions. In addition, the pollution haven hypothesis is found to be invalid both in the short- and long-run. Lastly, the ratification of NAFTA is evidenced to foster economic progress but inhibit environmental sustainability for its members in the long run. Hence, it can be said that the NAFTA countries are going away rather than going green. Furthermore, these findings are mostly seen to be heterogeneous, in terms of magnitude, across different environmental pollution quantiles. Lastly, the analysis unearths unidirectional causalities extending from economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and foreign direct investment inflows to carbon dioxide emissions without the respective feedback causality. In light of these major findings, this study recommends some critically important policies.
•Natural resource consumption increases CO2 emissions.•Renewable energy consumption reduces CO2 emissions.•The EKC hypothesis is valid for NAFTA nations.•The pollution haven hypothesis is invalid for NAFTA nations.•NAFTA favors economic growth over environmental sustainability.
How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational ...diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the institutional preferences and bargaining strategies of national governments. The author argues that Europe’s foremost regional organization systematically affects institution building abroad, but that such influence varies across different types of organization. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, it shows how the EU institutionally strengthens regional organizations through active engagement and by building its own institutions at home. Yet the contractual nature of other regional organizations bounds this causal influence: EU influence makes an identifiable difference primarily in those organizations that, like the EU itself, rest on an open-ended contract. Evidence for these claims is drawn from the statistical analysis of a dataset on the institutionalization of 35 regional organizations in the period from 1950 to 2017, as well as from detailed single and comparative case studies on institutional creation and (non-)change in the Southern African Development Community, Mercosur, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
A fundamental premise of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is that biodiversity and ecosystem services are key determinants of long-term sustainability of social-ecological systems. With a ...continuing decline in local and global biodiversity and ecosystem services, it is crucial to understand how biodiversity and various ecosystem services interact and how land change may modify these interactions over time. However, few studies have been conducted to quantify these relationships. In this study, we present the first empirical comparative results to analyze how spatial associations between biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) changed at multiple scales between 1984 and 2010 in the rapidly urbanizing San Antonio River Basin (SARB), Texas, USA. We found statistically significant positive spatial associations among biodiversity, carbon storage, and sediment retention both in the entire SARB and the urban watersheds in Bexar County. Overall, biodiversity and carbon storage declined across the SARB, while sediment retention remained relatively stable. Moreover, the rates of biodiversity loss and carbon storage degradation were negatively related to the urban expansion and have accelerated since the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. During the pre- and post-NAFTA periods (1984–1995 and 1995–2010, respectively) the rates of biodiversity loss increased from 0.7% to 0.9%, and the rates of carbon-storage loss increased from 0.1% to 1.4% per annum in the urban watersheds. Our hotspot analyses indicate that the upstream watersheds in the Basin, which supply water to the critically important Edwards Aquifer, should be targeted for priority conservation to mitigate the adverse impacts of land change on BES. Our results suggest the strong need for green infrastructure policies that integrate biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of multiple ecosystem services to address the environmentally deleterious impacts of the extensive land change under the NAFTA and to ensure the long-term social-ecological sustainability of the rapidly urbanizing SARB.
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•We conduct an analysis of urban impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES).•We find synergistic spatio-temporal relationships between BES at multiple scales.•Loss of BES accelerated under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).•Green infrastructure to integrate BES is critical for the San Antonio River Basin.
Our goal is to study how stocks from Mexico and United States are interconnected. We apply a novel method based on a graphical model. We estimate partial correlations for every year of the period ...2000-2020. Our results based on partial correlation matrices show a systematic level of inter-connectivity across countries that metrics from network theory confirm. An important difference between these countries is how sectors in each market are linked. Most sector graphs in the United States are densely interconnected. In contrast, sectors in Mexico present much less links. We then compare networks in the periods of the subprime mortgage crisis and the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The different propagation speeds of both crises are correctly captured by the metrics. A limitation is derived from information, and it is desirable to include actualized data in the study. The deployed novel method, which led to obtain new results, endow originality to the work. It is concluded that disaggregated data provides a promising venue of research.
We investigate the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for the NAFTA countries. In this investigation, we approach this hypothesis from a different methodology and propose ...employing the ARMEY curve hypothesis since the mathematical-functional propositions of both hypotheses were constructed on the same inverted U-shaped relationships. Thus, for the first time, it can be interpreted that the EKC hypothesis is empirically tested through a transmission mechanism of the ARMEY curve hypothesis in a single composite model. Therefore, this approach makes our study different from all empirical studies in the relevant literature. We apply the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator to this aim. Empirical findings indicate that the ARMEY curve hypothesis was verified only for the USA. However, this new approach proposed in this study cannot test the EKC hypothesis through the ARMEY curve model for any NAFTA country since this approach requires verification of the ARMEY curve hypothesis and a significant composite model for the same NAFTA country. If our composite model was significant, it might make it possible to numerically determine a maximum real GDP per capita level that would minimize or maximize CO
2
emission levels for the USA. Therefore, this study introduces-proposes this new methodology as an alternative way of testing the EKC hypothesis in the relevant literature for future empirical studies.
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