The Trade Effects of Environmentally Related Technical Measures

Open hybrid seminar with Fabio Santeramo, Department of Agricultural, Food, Natural Resources and Engineering, University of Foggia.

About the seminar

Technical regulations, such as Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) are numerous and growing, but less transparent than price measures. They are frequently used in support of environmental protection, because of challenges posed by climate change. While the goal of environmental technical measures (env-TBT) is to improve environmental outcomes, their trade effects are heterogenous and opaque, raising the question on whether these TBT are discriminatory against foreign markets.

We disentangle the contribution of env-TBT on trade outcomes and investigate the role of development at the country and sector levels. In fact, trade outcomes of env-TBT are likely to be highly heterogeneous in terms of either degree of economic development of the trading countries and degree of technological content of the trade goods. A gravity-based analysis reveals that the trade barrier effect of env-TBT tends to prevail, although marked differences are observed across countries and sectors. Less developed countries tend to be impacted the most and the detrimental effects of env-TBT is observed also on their exports of no tech product that in general are favoured by these regulations.

Assessing the magnitudes, sources and drivers of the heterogeneous trade outcomes may help disentangling the pure (private) mercantilist nature of the env-TBT from the more noble (public) environmental protection goals.

How to participate

The seminar is open to all.
The seminar will take place in room A2-84.12, Thorvaldsensvej 40, 1871 Frederiksberg and on Zoom.