There is an ongoing debate about bilateral investment treaties (BITs) – and investor-state arbitration, in particular – between those who maintain that BITs encourage investment in developing countries by providing enforceable rights and protections for investors, and those who suspect that...

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution-intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the "pollution haven" hypothesis, is much...

Market based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world's environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an "efficient" allocation of society's resources. As a result, many...

Environmental economics assumes that reliance on price signals, adjusted for externalities, normally leads to efficient solutions to environmental problems. We explore a limiting case, when market volatility created "mixed signals": waste paper and other recycled materials were briefly worth an...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had a profound impact on corn trade between the United States and Mexico. Negotiated tariff reductions and the Mexican government’s decision not to charge some tariffs to which it was entitled resulted in a doubling of US corn exports to Mexico....

What is the dollar value of saving a human life? Cost-benefit analysis of health and environmental regulation requires such a number, yet the concept raises numerous ethical and philosophical questions. There are good general reasons to reject the entire enterprise of monetizing life, and...

This paper identifies a number of errors and inconsistencies in a series of air pollution intensities for Mexico that were recently created by the World Bank. Because these data are being used to conduct public policy analysis and advice for Mexico and countries at similar levels of development,...

A developing country will derive long-lasting development benefits from FDI only, if there is the right coincidence between its location-specific assets and TNCs’ global interests, and the right match between the country’s national linkage capability and TNCs’ strategic interest in...

Although there is a burgeoning literature on the effects of international trade on the environment, relatively little work has been done on where trade most directly effects the environment: the transportation sector. This article shows how international trade is affecting criteria air pollution...

Given increasing concern over global climate change and national security there is a burgeoning interest in examining the relationship between economic growth and energy use in developed and developing countries. More specifically, de-linking energy use per unit of gross domestic product (GDP)...