Exporting the Greenhouse: Foreign Capital Penetration and CO? Emissions 19801996

By P. Grimes, Jeffrey Kentor. 2003

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This research examines the impact of foreign investment dependence on carbon dioxide emissions between 1980 and 1996. In a cross-national panel regression analysis of 66 less developed countries, we find that foreign capital penetration in 1980 has a significant positive effect on the growth of C0 2 emissions between 1980 and 1996. Domestic investment, however, has no systematic effect. We suggest several reasons for these findings. Foreign investment is more concentrated in those industries that require more energy. Second, transnational corporations may relocate highly polluting industries to countries with fewer environmental controls. Third, the movement of inputs and outputs resulting from the global dispersion of production over the past 30 years is likely to be more energy-expensive in countries with poorer infrastructure. Finally, power generation in the countries receiving foreign investment is considerably less efficient than within the countries of the core.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/658098763bbc0463be76da57735a82541aa593a7

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

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).”
Ecological Unequal Exchange: Consumption, Equity, and Unsustainable Structural Relationships within the Global Economy (2007, background): “Relevant to considerations of distributional dynamics between world-system positions, research by Grimes and Kentor (2003) reveals foreign capital investment in LDCs is positively associated with growth in total CO2 emissions.”
T ra nsna tio na l linka ge s a nd t he spill ove r of env iro n m ent- ef fi ci ency into develo pi ng c ountri es (2009, background): “…(in absolute terms and/or per unit of output) for these gases, reaching mixed results about the influence of cross-national linkages on domestic enviro mental performance (Grimes and Kentor, 2003, Heil and Selden, 2001, Jorgenson, 2007, Mielnik and Goldemberg, 2002, Perkins and Neumayer, 2008).”