Environmental Stringency and International Trade: A Look Across the Globe

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the impact of carbon pricing, as a means to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, on international trade in goods using a pane dataset of OECD and other developing countries with data over the period 2007 to 2018. We use Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood regressions (PPML) with multi-dimensional fixed effects to estimate a gravity model of trade with panel data. To conduct our empirical analysis, we combine data on emissions from fuel combustion, which account for approximately 80 percent of global human-induced CO2 emissions and have been the main target of carbon pricing, with detailed international trade data using the HS 6-digit codes and information on the market-based policies applied by the countries over the sample period. Our findings confirm that, regardless of the environmental stringency variable used, pollution constraints have a significant impact on trade flows, with this effect being particularly pronounced in the most polluting industries.