Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded. A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a race to the bottom' effect. If...

This paper reviews arguments and evidence on the impact of globalization on the environment, then presents evidence on production and international trade flows in five heavily polluting industries for 52 countries over the period 1981-98. A new decomposition of revealed comparative advantage...

How should international economic policy address climate change? Does trade cause deforestation and endangered species depletion? How does globalization affect air and water pollution? Do trade and investment create a race to the bottom in environmental policy? How important are environmental...

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random...

Trade growth for a relatively poor country is thought to shift the composition of industrial output towards dirtier products, aggravating environmental damage. China's rapidly growing trade and serious environmental degradation appear to be no exception. However, much of China's trade growth is...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

Over the past decade, concern over potential global warming has focused attention on the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and there is an active debate concerning the desirability of reducing emissions. At the heart of this debate is the future path of both greenhouse gas...

Evidence suggests that some pollutants follow an inverse-U-shaped pattern relative to countries' incomes. This relationship has been called the out a simple and straight-forward static model of the microfoundations of the pollution-income relationship. We show that the environmental Kuznets...

The most recent addition to the economics of gloom concerns the interplay between income and environmental degradation. The main question raised is whether or not continued environmental degradation is a necessary part of the process of industrialization. Will pollution continue to increase...