Trade liberalization and the environment: Evidence from NAFTA and U.S. manufacturing

By Jevan Cherniwchan. 2017

277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The unobserved responses of individual polluters are often used to rationalize the aggregate effects of international trade on the environment. In this paper, I provide the first evidence of these responses. I estimate the effects of NAFTA on the emissions of particulate matter (PM10) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) from manufacturing plants in the United States. My findings suggest that trade liberalization led to significant reductions of these pollutants at affected plants. On average, nearly two-thirds of the reductions in PM10 and SO2 emissions from the U.S. manufacturing sector between 1994 and 1998 can be attributed to trade liberalization following NAFTA.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ed427e6ff7a61e8d4bc7da48f81f5f3fdcc2cd8

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

1. Ting Xu
2. Jakob Schwab
3. Axel Berger
4. J. Morin
5. Zhike Lv
6. Clara Brandi

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Ting Xu
2. Zhike Lv

Citations in the corpus

• Trade openness, urbanization and CO2 emissions: Dynamic panel data analysis of middle-income countries (2018, background): “Since then, numerous studies have examined the nexus of environment and trade openness (Managi, Hibiki, and Tsurumi 2009; Kreickemeier and Richter 2014; Cherniwchan 2017).”
• Trade, pollution and mortality in China (2016, unknown): “In the cross-section Forslid et al. (2018) find that exporters tend to have lower emission intensities, while Cherniwchan (2017) finds lower emissions as firms are exposed to tariffs cuts in the output market.”
• Do environmental provisions in trade agreements make exports from developing countries greener? (2020, background): “Empirical evidence remains ambiguous, but several studies provide some support for the pollution haven hypothesis (e.g. Li & Zhou, 2016; Cherniwchan, 2017).”
• Trade and the Environment: New Methods, Measurements, and Results (2017, unknown): “(2008)), and several authors in the trade and environment literature have recently adopted these methods (see, for example, Martin (2012), Cherniwchan et al. (2013), and Barrows & Ollivier (2016)).”