One of the most contentious debates today is whether pollution-intensive industries from rich countries relocate to poor countries with weaker environmental standards, turning them into "pollution havens." Empirical studies to date show little evidence to support the pollution haven hypothesis,...

In less than three decades, China has grown from playing a negligible role in international trade to being one of the world's largest exporters, a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and other goods, and both a recipient and source of foreign investment. Not...

Some believe that relatively lenient environmental standards give developing countries a comparative advantage in pollution-intensive goods. Thus, freer trade will harm their environment. This paper brings together the literature on openness and growth, and on the environmental Kuznet's curve,...

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...

One of the most contentious debates today is whether pollution-intensive industries from rich countries relocate to poor countries with weaker environmental standards, turning them into pollution havens. Empirical studies to date show little evidence to support the pollution haven hypothesis,...

In recent debates, trade preference erosion has been viewed by some as damaging to developing countries, and by others as insignificant, except in a few cases. But little data have been available to back either view. The objective of this paper is to improve our measures of the size,...

The recent revitalization of concern for environmental quality has generated many questions about the interaction between trade and the environment. Most of these questions have to do with the impact of environmental regulation on trade patterns and gains from trade. If a tradeoff is perceived,...

At the center of the pollution haven debate is the claim that foreign investors from industrial countries are attracted to weak environment regulations in developing countries. Some recent location choice studies have found evidence of this attraction, but only for inward FDI in industrial...