Environmental Policies in an International Context

全球环境是工业化国家和发展中国家之间的一个主要问题。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关于环境与国际债务、投资和技术政策的建议被恰当地视为以市场行为为中心的一般平衡现象。这是因为一个国家的环境行动影响到其他国家，环境资源市场影响到所有其他市场。这个项目解决了以下未解决的问题：为什么发展中国家专门生产和出口过度使用环境投入（如雨林）的商品？国际贸易在全球环境问题中的作用是什么？有可能在不干预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格局和资源利用格局？这项研究基于对南北贸易一般平衡模型的分析，其中环境似乎是一种可再生的共同财产资源，如含水层、渔业和森林，其副产品被用作贸易货物生产的投入。将通过模拟具有代表性的示例模型来提供数据，并作为评估两种备选策略的基础。第一种是对环境资源的使用征税或实行配额。二是推动环境共有财产资源产权制度的变革。模拟使用了从涉及产权的创新安排中获得的参数，例如美国和英国的制药业以及中南美洲的雨林。美国的两家制药公司：加利福尼亚州的萨满制药公司和新泽西州的默克公司给出了说明性的案例研究。两者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.