International Trade and the Environment

The 1990s was a decade of widely publicized debate about the relationship between international trade and the environment. This debate was influential enough to lead to an environmental side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to a working group in the World Trade Organization on trade and the environment, and to a US presidential mandate that procedures be developed to evaluate the environmental implications of future trade agreements. It also played a key role in the protests against a new WTO round (1999) and policies of the World Bank and IMF (2000). Does the presence of environmental damage erode the ganis from trade, or imply that trade reduces welfare? Does it give developing countries an unfair advantage in producing pollution-intensive goods? Should trade be testricted in the presence of environmental externalities? Should all countries have the same environmental standards? These questions are at the centre of the contemporary debate. They were also the questions at the centre of the debate at least 25 years ago. This volume assembles some of the important theoretical and empirical journal articles which contribute to our understanding of the interface between trade and environment. The collection includes foundational studies from the 1970s and early 1980s, contemporary extensions of early work, and contributions on new issues raised in the 1990s.