Trade and Environment: The Regulatory Controversy and a Theoretical and Empirical Assessment of Unilateral Environmental Action (Contributions to Economics)

Even though the interlinkage between trade and environment is obvious and important, it has been acknowledged as such only recently by the world community. Yet it is far from being truly addressed, as is indicated by the negotiations up to the Uruguay Round Final Act, signed in April 1994, as the most current example. Mankind remains faced with the crucial need of addressing this interlinkage -the objective to which this report is devoted. My own growing interest in this subject and the choice to work on and publish this report, which has been defended as my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Vienna, has had a long personal history. Ultimately it was made possible by important teachers of mine -from primary and high school up to universities -, by colleagues and friends, but certainly also by my family -as each of them answered my questions and communicated their own ideas. Along the path of research it was only the specific support and inspiration of a large number of people in various different ways that made it possible for the report to now be in front of you in the current form. Even though the interlinkage between trade and environment is obvious and important, it has been acknowledged as such only recently by the world community. Yet it is far from being truly addressed, as is indicated by the negotiations up to the Uruguay Round Final Act, signed in April 1994, as the most current example. Mankind remains faced with the crucial need of addressing this interlinkage -the objective to which this report is devoted. My own growing interest in this subject and the choice to work on and publish this report, which has been defended as my Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Vienna, has had a long personal history. Ultimately it was made possible by important teachers of mine -from primary and high school up to universities -, by colleagues and friends, but certainly also by my family -as each of them answered my questions and communicated their own ideas. Along the path of research it was only the specific support and inspiration of a large number of people in various different ways that made it possible for the report to now be in front of you in the current form This book supplies a categorization of the manifold interlinkages between trade and environment. It investigates two central ones in detail. The trade regulatory is pursued on a theoretical as well as original paradigmatic basis. For an open economy unilaterally setting its environmental process regulation more strictly, economic effects are identified within traditional and new trade theory, and empirically quantified for Austria within a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework. Of general interest is the in-depth introduction to the spreading CGE-method, its history and traditions, and recent environmental applications Front Matter....Pages I-XIII Introduction....Pages 1-6 The Issues of Interlinkage....Pages 7-23 The Regulatory Issue....Pages 24-69 Divergent Environmental Process Regulation in Open Economies....Pages 70-106 Modeling the Environment-Economy Interaction for Austria in a Trade-Focused Computable General Equilibrium Framework....Pages 107-169 Conclusions....Pages 170-184 Back Matter....Pages 185-219