research project details
Project Title: 2004 NAREA Workshop on Trade and the Environment
Investigator(s): David Abler and James Shortle
Sponsor: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Environmental Problem Addressed:
Impact of international trade on the environment.
Research Project Objectives:
The objective of this project is to sponsor a workshop that will bring academic research into a single forum to:
- Establish a foundation from which to transfer existing research from academia to policy decision-makers concerned with trade and the environment; and
- Stimulate innovative thinking about current needs for additional applied research to fill gaps relevant to policy professionals.
The goal of this workshop is to stimulate research and discussion to improve our understanding of the complex interrelationships between international trade, natural resource use, and the environment. To maximize atendance and the dissemination of ideas, the workshop will coincide with the annual meeting of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) in June 2004.
Summary:
The impact of international trade on the environment has been a contentious issue since the early 1990's. The debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), stimulated a great deal of economic research on the ways in which international trade might be environmentally harmful or environmentally beneficial.
New trade negotiations have moved trade and the environment to the forefront once again. Executive Order 13141 and the U.S. Trade Act of 2002 require environmental assessments of trade agreements during the negotiation process. The environment was a key topic of negotiation in the recently concluded U.S.-Singapore free trade agreement, and a committment to enforce existing environmental laws was part of the recently concluded U.S.-Chile free trade agreement.
From an academic perspective, current trade negotiations offer an opportunity to apply what was learned through research on trade and the environment during the last decade and through experience with the WHO, NAFTA, and other trade agreements. Important questions include:
- What turned out right about previous environmental assessments of trade agreements, and why? What turned out to be wrong, and why? How can this knowledge be applied to improve assessments of currently proposed trade agreements?
- What have been the major developments in the trade and environmental literature during the past decade? How do these developments improve our ability to assess the environmental impacts of currently proposed trade agreements?
- Are specially created international environmental bodies, such as the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, established concurrently with NAFTA, desirable?
- Are the quantitative models currently available to assess the environmental impacts of trade agreements adequate? If not, what types of models would be required, and what would be the data and parameter requirements of those models? How should the challenges presented by simultaneous trade liberalization and reform of the U.S., E.U., and Japanese agricultural policies be addressed, when modeling the Doha round of the WTO?
- Given the time- and location-specific nature of agriculture's externalities, how should environmental impacts of agricultural activities be modeled for international trade negotiation purposes?
To address these questions, the workshop will involve a combination of invited and contributed papers that will used to develop a refereed volume of information that will be a starting point for both applied researchers and practitioners on environment and trade issues. The volume will provide a foundation in existing research. Both invited and selected papers will be submitted for publication in a one or two-part special issue of Agricultural and Resource Economics Review.