Foreign Trade and the Environment

Abstract

In modern times, environmental degradation has become one of the main problems our society faces. It has been worsened by the opening of the markets and the liberalization of international trade. In this sense, international trade has caused a series of mainly-harmful effects on the environment, which is why the International Community has been forced to establish a series of environmental measures to try to reduce the impact it could generate. For these reasons, the current paper tries to study the impact and the effects these measures applied on international trade for environmental protection really have. The paper also tries to determine how they will evolve in the following years. Similarly, we focused our study on an econometric analysis based on the effect that actually produces the imposition of a tax on CO2 emissions in certain countries in Europe, to determine if we have a tax collection effort by the government, or otherwise, it is able to reduce the impact of international trade on the environment. Finally, we propose a serie of business practices that we understand that it can help to reduce the impact of economic activity.