On Trade Policies and Climate Change

ended

Climate Change and Trade are two examples of public goods that call for international cooperation and coordination. The threats due to changes in climate conditions and the losses potentially due to adverse (or extreme) weather events have induced countries to look for common solutions. Moreover, trade and climate change are not only two global scale issues, but they are also tightly connected: trade is a major economic activity, climate is a major exogenous factor in economic production. Trade and climate change have direct and indirect links: trade impacts climate either through the emissions of the transport industry, and by favoring (or disfavoring) emissions-saving productions; climate change directly impacts trade by modifying comparative advantages, and indirectly by legitimating trade as an adaptation strategy. Trade is fostered by trade policies, which are also tightly connected to the dynamics of climate change. Thus, environmental and trade policies tend to be connected, and research to deepen on these links would be beneficial. The proposed research aims at investigating how climate change influences trade (volumes, values, and patterns) and how trade policies are evolving and are likely to evolve due to climate change. The research will focus on the effects of climate change on trade and trade policies. More precisely, the project intends to achieve the following two goals: (i) analyse the links between, trade and climate change, and quantify the impacts; (ii) investigate the path dependencies in trade, trade regulations and climate change, so to evaluate co-benefits and side-effects of seemingly unrelated policies on climate change and trade. The methodological approach that I will follow stands out against previously adopted methods. I propose an econometric analysis to investigate the links between climate change, trade and policies, and a multidiscplinary approach to better model and interpret these links.