International trade continues to drive biological invasions. We investigate the drivers of global nonnative ant establishments over the last two centuries using a Cox proportional hazards model. We use country-level discovery records for 36 of the most widespread nonnative ant species worldwide from 1827 to 2012. We find that climatic similarity combined with cumulative imports during the 20 years before a species discovery in any given year is an important predictor of establishment. Accounting for invasions from both the native and previously invaded "bridgehead" regions substantially improves the model's fit, highlighting the role of spatial spillovers. These results are valuable for targeting biosecurity efforts.

Border inspections are a powerful tool for preventing pest invasions through the pathway of international trade. Inspection resources, however, are highly constrained, meaning only a small subset of incoming shipments is actually inspected. Inspection efficiency can be improved by targeting effort, for example, towards shipments of fresh produce and horticultural products from exporters with a history of sending contaminated products. While such targeting is well-understood and used by many importers, it is not effective for the targeting of novel and/or transient threats. In this study, we combine theory and empirical analysis to investigate how market-based signals such as price spikes can be exploited to fine-tune inspection effort. We build a simple theoretical model to analyse the behaviour within the supply-chain for perishable goods when heterogeneous manufacturers (e.g. hothouses) face capacity constraints and risk-mitigation is endogenous. The theoretical model suggests price fluctuations in the market may provide early warnings of increasing risk in a pathway. The underlying mechanism is that wholesalers may increase purchases from non-traditional sources when prices spike—sources that have no reputational risk from supplying infested products—thereby increasing the contamination rate for shipments received from a given shipper. The primary testable hypothesis is that price spikes correlate with higher infestation rates, especially when the price spikes are unanticipated. We test this hypothesis using data from the UK inspection agency on import inspections from 2010-2019. After controlling for seasonality, commodity and exporter fixed effects, we find a strong, positive link between price increases and pest infestation. Historically, profiling imports for pest risk has been limited to using the outcomes of prior inspection outcomes. Our analysis offers an important new tool for leveraging real-time market data to enhance the cost-effectiveness of scarce border inspections for the mitigation of damaging pests, especially from novel, emerging threats.

In official international trade statistics, annual commerce between every pair of countries is reported twice: once by the importing country and once by the exporter.These double reports provide an opportunity for audit.In principle, the two reported trade values should differ systematically only by transport costs, because the values reported by importers include freight and insurance.But in practice, after controlling for distance and other standard trade costs, the remaining gaps between importer-and exporter-reported trade vary systematically with GDP, tariffs and taxes, auditing standards, corruption, and trade agreements, suggesting that firms intentionally misreport trade data.These misreports have implications for trade agreements and domestic fiscal policy, and for empirical assessments of the efficacy of those policies.

International trade in hazardous and nonhazardous waste and scrap products has been growing at an exceptional rate the past two decades. This review presents current data on the magnitude and trends regarding this growth and discusses the recent literature as it pertains to the economic incentives and drivers of international waste trade. Differences in environmental policy, taxes, disposal fees, and transport costs are important determinants across countries. However, the illegal nature of many types of hazardous waste also means that organized crime may play a role in some countries. Gaps in our understanding regarding microeconomic incentives as they relate to upstream and downstream recyclers and to the social welfare implications for wages, environmental quality, and human health are also discussed.

In contrast to prior disaggregated product level studies on tariff evasion which have focused on select country pairs, we develop a model that allows us to consistently estimate average tariff evasion effects on aggregate bilateral trade data. This has two distinct advantages over prior work. We are able to obtain a more general test for average tariff evasion effects across a large number of countries at different development levels and identify important policy relevant factors for misreporting of trade that cannot be identified at the product level of aggregation. On a panel of 128 importing and exporting countries over 11 years we find general evidence of tariff evasion effects through underreporting of imports. The results however are dependent on membership in regional trade agreements and level of economic development. In addition, we find robust evidence that the strength of auditing and accounting standards, product tax rates, and motivations for avoiding capital controls are also strongly correlated with exporter incentives to underreport exports. JEL Codes: F13, F14, H26

In a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenously determined domestic and multinational firms, it is shown that public infrastructure development can have diverging implications for horizontal multinational affiliate firm production and trade, depending on the type of infrastructure invested in. Infrastructure investments with strong productive or local transport effects (i.e. schools or local roads) lead to greater domestic firm production and exports, fewer imports, and more foreign multinational affiliate firm production in the country making the investment. On the other hand, infrastructure projects that lower international trade and transaction costs (i.e. shipping ports or airports) lead to more domestic firms in both countries, a greater volume of bilateral exports in both directions, and less multinational affiliate production. Further, the effect of different types of infrastructure investment on income and welfare of the open economies is explored.

Combining a novel panel dataset of 18 Montana ranches with spatial data on known wolf pack locations and satellite-generated climatological data from 1995-2010, we estimate the spatial impact of changing wolf pack locations and confirmed wolf depredations on the weight of beef calves. We find no evidence that wolf packs with home ranges that overlap ranches have any detrimental effects on calf weights. Other non-wolf factors, notably climate and individual ranch-specific husbandry practices, explained the majority of the variation in the weight of calves. However, ranches that experienced a confirmed cattle depredation by wolves had a negative and statistically significant impact of approximately 22 pounds on the average calf weight across their herd, possibly due to inefficient foraging behavior or stress to mother cows. For ranches experiencing confirmed depredation, the costs of these indirect weight losses are shown to potentially be greater than the costs of direct depredation losses that have, in the past, been the only form of compensation for ranchers who have suffered wolf depredations. These results demonstrate a potentially important and understudied aspect of economic conflict arising from the protection and funding of endangered species recovery programs.

Most evidence suggests that the 1,000 or so different International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) operating today are ineffectual, merely ratifying business-as-usual outcomes. But much of that empirical analysis faces two obstacles: (1) limited data from before the IEAs were enacted and thus an inability to make before-and-after comparisons and (2) difficulty estimating the counterfactual outcomes-what would have happened absent the agreements. We study one particular IEA-the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. In this special case we do have data prior to the agreement, enabling us to identify the treaty's effects using annual bilateral waste shipments among countries before and after one of the trading partners ratifies the agreement. Despite the strengths of this approach, we find almost no evidence that the Convention has resulted in less waste being shipped among countries.

Many of the world's environmental problems cross international borders, and to address those problems approximately 1,000 different International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) are in operation today.Most evidence, however suggests that those IEAs are ineffectual, merely ratifying business-as-usual outcomes and doing little to improve the environment.But much of that empirical analysis faces two obstacles: (1) limited data from before the IEAs were enacted and thus an inability to make before-andafter comparisons; and (2) difficulty estimating the counterfactual outcomes -what would have happened absent the agreements.In this paper we test the effectiveness of one particular IEA -the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.In this special case we have data on international waste shipments from both before and after countries ratify the agreement, along with a unique approach to identifying the treaty's effect using annual bilateral waste shipments among countries before and after one of the trading partners signs the agreement.Despite the strengths of this approach, we find almost no evidence that the Convention has resulted in less waste being shipped among countries.

International cooperation will be critical to solving the world's toughest environmental problems, including climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity. Regrettably, most evidence suggests that the 1,000 or so different International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) operating today are ineffectual, merely ratifying business-as-usual outcomes and doing little to improve the environment. But much of that empirical analysis faces two obstacles: (1) limited data from before the IEAs were enacted and thus an inability to make before-and-after comparisons; and (2) difficulty estimating the counterfactual outcomes – what would have happened absent the agreements. In this paper we test the effectiveness of one particular IEA – the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. In this special case we have data on international waste shipments from both before and after countries ratify the agreement, along with a unique approach to identifying the treaty's effect using annual bilateral waste shipments among countries before and after one of the trading partners signs the agreement. Despite the strengths of this approach, we find almost no evidence that the Convention has resulted in less waste being shipped among countries. JEL Codes: F18, F13, Q53, Q56

The international trade of waste products is large and has grown substantially in the past decade. While a sizeable literature has flourished around the notion of international pollution havens (the movement of goods production with polluting by-products to low environmental regulation countries), this paper is the first to explicitly test the hypothesis that differences in environmental regulation across countries can create international waste haven effects (the exporting of physical waste by-products, rather than goods production, to low environmental regulation countries). Using bilateral waste trade data and an index of environmental stringency for 92 countries, compelling evidence is found that waste imports increase for a country whose environmental regulations deteriorate vis-à-vis it's trading partner, implying that differences in environmental standards play an important role in international waste trade flows for some country pairs.

This review discusses the ways in which countries are affected by natural disasters, depending on their socioeconomic characteristics, their level of development, and their inherent levels of natural disaster risk. We also explore various aspects of ex ante disaster mitigation such as improvements in natural disaster risk information and natural disaster insurance markets, as well as ex post responses to natural disaster in the form of postdisaster aid and long-run growth prospects. By highlighting some of the recent findings in this literature, we synthesize what we know about the economics of natural disasters and identify research areas of interest for future work.

Pollution havens have received a great deal of attention in the past 15 years. However, the literature has focused almost exclusively on production side externalities and whether dirty industry migrates to countries with lax environmental laws. More recently, concerns have been raised about the rapid explosion of consumption side pollution such as e-waste and its trade in international markets. Between 1996 and 2007, US exports of waste plastics and ferrous waste along the USA-Asia trade route increased by 917% and 482%, respectively. Over the same time period the average freight rate on commercial liners along the USA-Asia trade route fell by 46%, while average freight rates along the Asia-USA trade route increased by 2.9%. This paper develops a two country trade model with endogenous asymmetric transport costs as well as externalities associated with harmful waste generated from consumption. It shows that even when both governments set optimal Pigouvian taxes on the consumption of the dirty good, endogenous asymmetric transport costs can lower the 'backhaul' rate from North to South. This creates an environmental arbitrage condition by which it is cheaper for the North to export its waste to the South rather than dispose of it at home. The model yields a number of clear predictions regarding the relationship between country characteristics, the international terms of trade, the backhaul shipping rate, and the North's export supply function of waste.

Using a new dataset on the stringency and enforcement of environmental policy, this study is the first to find robust confirmation of a pollution haven effect in a cross-country context by accounting for strategically determined environment, trade, and intellectual property right (IPR) policies. A simple game theoretic approach to policy determination is described which suggests an identification strategy based on other country characteristics. It is found that for the top 20th percentile of countries in terms of growth in U.S multinational affiliate value added, as much as 8.6% of that growth between 1999 and 2003 can be attributed to declining relative stringency and enforcement of environmental policy. The results are robust to a number of identification tests, weak IV tests, and third country spatial effects. Further, evidence is found that relatively ‘footloose’ industries are more likely to be affected by environmental policy than more traditionally ‘dirty’ industries and enforcement of environmental policies tends to be a more important deterrent than the stringency of the policy set.

A structural model of a small open economy is developed that demonstrates how the impacts of infrastructure on GDP, factor productivity, and multinational industrial location can be decomposed into direct and indirect general equilibrium effects. The model is then estimated on a panel of 28 countries and it is found that schools and telecommunications have a positive and significant direct effect on domestic growth and that there are greater marginal returns for countries with higher investment levels; a result that is suggestive of a critical mass story. However, once spurious correlation of firm location and the indirect effects through wages and multinational activity are accounted for, the total effects of telecommunications and schools on growth are found to be higher than direct estimates would suggest. The results reveal important implications for understanding the channels through which infrastructure influences growth.

Pollution havens have received a great deal of attention in the past 15 years. However, the literature has focused almost exclusively on production side externalities and whether dirty industry migrates to countries with lax environmental laws. More recently, concerns have been raised about the rapid explosion of consumption side pollution such as e-waste and its trade in international markets. Between 1996 and 2005, US exports of waste plastics and waste steel along the USA-Asia trade route increased by 2,433% and 513%, respectively. Over the same time period the average freight rate on commercial liners along the USA-Asia trade route fell by 43%, while average freight rates along the Asia-USA trade route increased by more than 14%. This paper develops a two country trade model with endogenous asymmetric transport costs as well as externalities associated with harmful waste generated from consumption. It is shown that even when both governments set optimal Pigouvian taxes on the consumption of the dirty good, endogenous asymmetric transport costs can lower the 'backhaul' rate from North to South. This creates an environmental arbitrage condition by which it is cheaper for the North country to export it's waste to the South rather than dispose of it at home. The model yields a number of clear predictions regarding the relationship between country characteristics, the international terms of trade, the backhaul shipping rate, and the North's export supply function of waste.

Recent work on the relationship between international trade and the environment has found small but negative effects of increased openness on measures of pollution for the average country. On a panel of 128 countries it is shown that, like previous studies, the trade intensity effect is negative and significant for the average country for emissions of four localized pollutants (SO2, NOX, CO, and VOCs). However, trade intensity effects are not uniform across countries of different income levels. In fact, a strong non-monotonicity exists in trade intensity elasticities. It is found that countries with relative world incomes less than 0.5 or greater than 2.5 tend to have positive trade intensity elasticities, while countries with relative world incomes between 0.5 and 2.5 tend to have negative trade intensity elasticities. The results imply that both factor abundance and pollution haven effects may be at work, but that the dominance of one effect over the other depends on a country's level of development.

A small open economy model is developed that incorporates direct and indirect effects on multinational location decisions associated with public input provision. It is shown that when agglomeration externalities are present in local intermediate goods markets, public input provision can affect multinational firms directly by lowering the fixed costs of production and indirectly by decreasing the costs of intermediate inputs, but growth is contingent on achieving a critical mass of investment. It is further shown that the effectiveness of a policy of public input provision over a policy of subsidy incentives is critically dependent on key market parameters in the host country. (JEL F2, H4, O1)