Environmental Policies in an International Context

全球环境是工业国家和发展中国家之间的一个重大问题。1992年6月在里约热内卢举行的联合国地球问题首脑会议提出的将环境与国际债务、投资和技术政策联系起来的建议被恰当地视为以市场行为为中心的一般均衡现象。这是因为一个国家的环境行动会影响其他国家，而环境资源的市场也会影响所有其他市场。该项目涉及以下悬而未决的问题：为什么发展中国家专门从事过度使用热带雨林等环境投入的商品的生产和出口？国际贸易在全球环境问题中的作用是什么？有可能在不干扰自由市场的情况下保护资源吗？什么时候需要市场干预？环境资源使用税是否会改善贸易和资源利用的模式？这项研究基于对南北贸易一般均衡模型的分析，在该模型中，环境表现为可再生的共同财产资源，如含水层、渔业和森林，其副产品被用作生产贸易商品的投入。这些数据将通过对具有代表性的例子的模型进行模拟来提供，并作为评估两种替代政策的基础。第一种是对环境资源的使用征税或实行配额。二是推动环境共有产权资源产权变动。这些模拟使用了从涉及产权的创新安排中获得的参数，在美国和英国的制药行业以及中美洲和南美洲的热带雨林。美国的两家制药公司给出了说明性的案例研究：加利福尼亚州的萨曼制药公司和新泽西州的默克公司。这两家公司都利用拉丁美洲和中美洲森林的生物多样性来开发医疗产品。

The global environment is a major issue between industrial and developing countries. The proposals advanced by the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro during June 1992 relating the environment with international debt, investment and technology policies are properly regarded as general equilibrium phenomena, centering on the behavior of markets. This is because the environmental actions of a country affect the others, and the markets for environmental resources affect all other markets. This project addresses the following unanswered questions: Why do developing countries specialize in the production and the export of goods which overuse environmental inputs such as rain forests? What is the role of international trade in global environmental issues? Is it possible to protect resources without interfering with free markets? When is market intervention required? Will taxes on the use of environmental resources improve the pattern of trade and of resource use? The research is based on the analysis of a general equilibrium model of North-South trade where the environment appears as a renewable common property resource such as aquifers, fisheries and forests, whose by-products are used as inputs to the production of traded goods. The data will be provided by simulating the model for representative examples, and used as a foundation for evaluating two alternative policies. The first is levying taxes or imposing quotas on the use of the environmental resources. The second is promoting changes in property rights for the environmental common property resources. The simulations use parameters obtained from innovative arrangements involving property rights in the case of the US and UK pharmaceutical industries and Central and South American rain forests. Illustrative case studies are given by two pharmaceutical companies in the US: Shaman Pharmaceutical of California, and Merck and Co. of New Jersey. Both use biodiversity from Latin American and Central American forests to develop medical products.