Essays on trade liberalization and the environment
Date
2020
Authors
Dinh, Minh, author
Kling, Robert, advisor
Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member
Mushinski, David, committee member
Kroll, Stephen, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
This dissertation explores the relationship between trade liberalization and the environment in several aspects. Chapter 2 first examines the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve for carbon dioxide emissions, in Vietnam and four other Southeast Asian countries: Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines. Then we include trade liberalization in the Environmental Kuznets Curve and investigate its determinants to further investigate the environmental impact of trade liberalization. We find evidence of a monotonically increasing linear relationship between per capita GDP and per capita carbon dioxide emissions for these five Southeast Asian countries in the period 1986-2010. The evidence supports the Pollution Haven Hypothesis that freer trade affects negatively the environment. Chapter 3 considers the issue of revealed comparative advantage in manufacturing industries in Vietnam, to examine whether Vietnam has become a "pollution haven" for pollution intensive industries as a result of the gap in environmental regulations between developed and developing countries. Then we examine how environmental stringency and factor intensities affect cross-industry trade specialization in Vietnam within a Heckscher-Ohlin framework. Our finding shows that serious environmental regulations have a negative impact on trade performance. Finally, Chapter 4 measures the pollution embodied in exports, the pollution embodied in imports, and the pollution content of Vietnam's international trade (for three air pollutants C02, SO2, NOx) in 2007 and 2012, using an Environmental Input-Output Analysis. Under the assumption of identical technology, the results show that Vietnam gained "environmentally" from trade liberalization and expansion as of 2007, and gradually became the "pollution haven" as of 2012. The dissertation concludes with chapter 5.