This paper contributes to the debate on the existence of pollution haven effects by systematically measuring the pollution content of trade (measured by the pollution content of imports, PCI) and decomposing it into three components-a"deep"component (unrelated to the environmental debate but...

A number of countries around the world have in recent years implemented environmental performance rating and public disclosure programs, and, where evidence is available, these programs have been shown to induce pollution reduction. Based on previous research and practical experiences from...

How does economic geography influence industrial production and thereby affect industrial location decisions and the spatial distribution of development? For manufacturing industry, what are the externalities that matter, and to what extent? Are these externalities spatially localized? The...

Business cycles are less volatile in rich countries than in poor ones. They are also more synchronized with the world cycle. The authors develop two alternative but noncompeting explanations for those facts. Both explanations proceed from the observation that the law of comparative advantage...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

Intra-industry trade as a share of total tradebetween Central and Eastern European nations and the European Union (EU) is among the highest of all the EU's bilateral trade flows. The authors break down data on these trade flows into horizontal and vertical components, and investigate the...

This paper argues that the definition of"manufactures"used in compiling production data for industrial and developing countries is far broader than the definition used for trade statistics. This limits the analytical utility of output and trade data for studies using, say, apparent consumption...

New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

Estache and Rossi estimate a stochastic costs frontier for a sample of Asian and Pacific water companies, comparing the performance of public and privatized companies based on detailed firm-specific information published by the Asian Development Bank in 1997. They find private operators of water...

Traditional approaches to pollution control emphasize the government's role in providing incentives to alter the behavior of relevant economic agents. But to exploit cost advantages at different levels of government, pollution control policies typically involve assigning a variety of...