Greens, Supergreens, and International Trade Policy: Environmental Concerns and Protectionism

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to investigate how environmental interests might influence the determination of international trade policy when production or consumption of an industry’s product has an adverse environmental impact. We assume that first-best environmental instruments are not available; our focus on trade policies as the sole instruments of intervention thus places policy choice in at least a second-best world. Environmental interests are a third party, additional to the traditional coalitions that have an interest in influencing trade policies. The traditional protagonists, who determine their policy positions with reference to personal economic gain, base their political actions on how trade policies affect profits and incomes. Environmentalists are, however, ostensibly motivated by “purer” concerns than personal gain, and would view themselves as taking altruistic positions that derive from “care for the benefit of mankind” where markets have failed. The principal general conclusion is that environmentalists need to consider carefully the underlying consistency between their environ mental objectives and their position on trade policy, in particular since there are strategic considerations involved which make the environmentalists potential bedfellows of interests that have less pure objectives in influencing trade policy than the environmentalists impute to themselves.