Suchergebnisse

AbstractDue to trade diversion, there have been concerns expressed over the proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that include South countries. In this paper, we compare welfare across different geographic configurations of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) and examine their implications for the stability of multilateral free trade. While North–North PTAs do tend to yield higher global welfare than South–South PTAs, a single South–South FTA may make free trade more sustainable than any other single agreement. With pre‐existing North–North agreements and a large enough cost asymmetry between regions, an additional South member or a new South–South agreement always makes free trade harder to sustain.

The Sydney Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens site in Nova Scotia, Canada, is among the most toxic hazardous waste sites in North America. This study presents hedonic estimates of the willingness-to-pay for remediation of the site using housing sales data from urban Sydney. Negative impacts are estimated with a maximum likelihood spatial autoregressive model of property values. Premiums on homes farther from the site are found to be substantial, and, when aggregated into a community willingness-to-pay measure ($169.2 million), cover a large proportion of the estimated remediation costs.

AbstractIn this paper, we compare endogenous environmental policy setting with centralized and decentralized governments when regions have comparative advantages in different polluting goods. We develop a two‐region, two‐good model with inter‐regional environmental damages and perfect competition in product markets, where both regions produce both goods. Despite positive spillovers of pollution across regions, the model predicts that decentralization may lead to weaker or stricter environmental standards or taxes, depending on the degree of regional comparative advantage and the extent of transboundary pollution. This suggests that federalism can lead to either a "race to the bottom" or a "race to the top," without relying on inefficient lobbying efforts or capital competition.