Structural Dynamics of International Trade and Material Consumption: A Cross-National Study of the Ecological Footprints of Less-Developed Countries

By Andrew K. Jorgenson, James Rice. 2005

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many social scientists argue that more-developed countries externalize their environmental costs through the tapping of resources of less-developed countries, which reduces levels of consumption in the latter while increasing forms of environmental degradation within their borders. However, these assertions lack systematic empirical support. This study offers a new conceptualization of the structure of international trade that may help to partly resolve this issue: weighted export flows, which quantifies the relative extent to which exports are sent to higher-consuming, more-developed countries. Our hypothesis is that less-developed countries with higher levels of exports sent to more-developed countries exhibit lower domestic levels of resource consumption, measured as ecological footprints. In a series of regression models of per capita ecological footprints for less-developed countries in 2000, evidence is found supporting the hypothesis. The negative effect of weighted export flows on the per capita footprints of nations is robust, net of the often cited impacts of capital intensity, urbanization, domestic inequality, human capital, and other export-related characteristics. Results of this study provide empirical evidence of the environmental impacts of the structure of international trade and outline a new methodological approach to studying uneven ecological exchange.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e11d2aec29e095f3730f3bc002763189cb921d9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Environmental Engineering

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Citations in the corpus

Ecologically Unequal Exchange, World Polity, and Biodiversity Loss (2009, background): “Put differently, wealthy nations are able to shift many of the negative environmental externalities associated with their natural resource demands and production needs onto poor nations (Bunker, 1984; Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005; Grimes and Kentor, 2003; Jorgenson, 2006b; Jorgenson and Rice, 2005).”
Ecologically Unequal Exchange and the Resource Consumption/Environmental Degradation Paradox (2009, background): “In a follow-up study, Jorgenson and Rice (2005) employ the same weighted index in a cross-sectional analysis of the per capita ecological footprints of less-developed countries (see also Rice, 2007b; Shandra et al., 2009).”
Ecological Unequal Exchange: Consumption, Equity, and Unsustainable Structural Relationships within the Global Economy (2007, background): “…cost-shifting: nations with higher levels of natural resource consumption generally experience lower domestic levels of natural resource degradation, a process sometimes referred to as the ‘consumption/environmental degradation paradox’ (Jorgenson, 2004, 2006; Jorgenson and Rice, 2005).”
The political-economic causes of change in the ecological footprints of nations, 1991-2001: A quantitative investigation (2007, background): “This Wnding is consistent with prior cross-sectional analyses (Jorgenson, 2005; Jorgenson and Rice, 2005).”
Zero-Sum World (2009, background): “…useful in analyzing uneven flows of international trade, as flows of commodities can be converted into flows of ‘embodied footprints’, that is, embodied land (Andersson, forthcoming; Andersson and Lindroth, 2001; Jorgenson, 2003; Jorgenson and Rice, 2005, 2007; Nordlund, 2009; York et al., 2003).”