Combining unique data bases on emissions with sectoral output and employment data, we study the sources of the fall in world-wide SO2 emissions and estimate the impact of trade on emissions. Contrarily to concerns raised by environmentalists, an emission-decomposition exercise shows that scale...

This paper contributes to the debate on the existence of pollution haven effects by systematically measuring the pollution content of trade (measured by the polluction content of imports (PCI)) and decomposing it into three components: a `deep' (i.e. unrelated to the environmental debate)...

We construct the world's centers of gravity for human population, GDP and CO2 emissions by taking the best out of five recognized data sources covering the last two centuries. On the basis of a novel distorsion-free representation of these centers of gravity, we find a radical Western shift of...