This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic output and various dimensions of air and water quality. Pollution may rise with growth, because an increased scale of economic activity means more emissions, ceteris paribus. Economic growth may be associated with a...

Agricultural support is often advocated as a means to national security. This is misguided. At current levels of consumption there is considerable scope for substitution away from food without catastrophic welfare losses, and even in the total absence of imports the United Kingdom could feed...

Combining unique data bases on emissions with sectoral output and employment data, we study the sources of the fall in world-wide SO2 emissions and estimate the impact of trade on emissions. Contrarily to concerns raised by environmentalists, an emission-decomposition exercise shows that scale...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African...

This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. I show that a...

This Paper presents a survey of the literature on trade liberalization and globalization. The questions are why trade liberalization occurred, why trade liberalization took the form of reciprocity combined with multilateralism, why the liberalization allows for protectionist policies, and why...

In many markets governments set minimum quality standards while some sellers choose to compete on the basis of quality by exceeding them. Such ‘high-quality’ strategies often win public acclaim, especially when ‘environmental friendliness’ is the dimension along which firms are...

A structural reform of the Icelandic fishing industry which created the conditions for fair and free trade in fishing permits in Icelandic waters could conceivably remove the main current obstacle to EC membership for Iceland. This reform would grant other EC nations formal access to the market...