Trade Reform, Environment and Intermediation: Implication for Health Standard

Health standard of a region or economy significantly depends on environmental quality. And informal sector has a striking role for overall environmental quality as sometimes producers prefer not to produce in the formal sector as formal production calls for stringent environmental and other governmental regulations. Under such circumstances the informal counterpart of the economy becomes heaven for those producers who do not want to abide by the rules. Extralegality of informal production, by definition, indicates the emergence of intermediation activity. In light of these concerns here I build a standard general equilibrium structure to capture these phenomena and to focus on the effects of trade reform. It has been shown in this paper that tariff reform may lead to greater usage of abatement technology under certain factor intensity assumption. However, interestingly, this can not unambiguously ensure a better environmental quality in broader sense.