污染控制与墨西哥吸收外商直接投资：一个产业层面的分析外文翻译

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1、 1 本科毕业论文外文翻译 外文题目： Pollution Control and Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico: An Industry-Level Analysis 出 处： Environmental and Resource Economics 作 者： Andreas Waldkirch and Munisamy Gopinath 译 文： Pollution Control and Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico: An Industry-Level Analysis Andreas Waldkirc

2、h and Munisamy Gopinath ABSTRACT Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into developing countries have been increasing dramatically over the past decade. At the same time, there has been widespread concern that lax environmental standards are in part responsible for this surge. This paper revisits th

3、e question of the existence of a pollution haven effect by examining the extent to which the pollution intensity of production helps explain FDI in Mexico. We focus on pollution intensities, which are directly related to emission regulations, rather than unobservable pollution taxes and allow for su

4、bstitution between capital and pollution. Examining several different pollutants, we find a positive correlation between FDI and pollution that is statistically and economically significant in the case of the highly regulated sulfur dioxide emissions. Industries for which the estimated relationship

5、between FDI and pollution is positive receive up to 30% of total FDI and 30% of manufacturing output. Although we confirm the importance of Mexicos comparative advantage in labor-intensive production processes, consistent with the previous literature, our results suggest that environmental considera

6、tions may matter as well for firms investment decisions. Introduction 2 Concerns about the effects of environmental standards on trade and investment flows abound. There is much talk about a “race to the bottom”, where developing countries in particular are said to be increasing their competitive ad

7、vantage in the world economy due to lower labor and environmental standards. Some in the developed world view the lower standards as “unfair” cost advantages and have suggested ways to limit or eliminate them. For instance, the labor and environmental side agreements to the North American Free Trade

8、 Agreement(NAFTA) sought to level the “standards” between the United States and Mexico. The side agreements hoped to prevent Mexico, which has lower environmental standards, from becoming a pollution haven for US and Canadian firms trying to avoid the costs associated with more stringent domestic en

9、vironmental standards. However, the academic literature has reported very mixed results. Many studies fail to find empirical support for environmental standards to affect either trade or firms investment decisions, with only a select few reporting significant effects. A review of the literature is g

10、iven by Jaffe et al. (1995) and Wheeler (2001), who conclude that there is hardly any empirical support for the existence of a pollution haven effect. More recently, Eskeland and Harrison (2003) find that abatement cost and pollution intensity do not affect foreign direct investment (FDI) into Moroc

11、co, Cte dIvoire, Venezuela, and Mexico. Smarzynska and Wei (2004) for a sample of 24 transition countries and Dean et al. (2005) in a study of China find some, though relatively weak evidence of a pollution haven effect, the latter only for investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao. An exception i

12、s Ederington and Miniers (2003) study, which finds that environmental regulations significantly affect trade flows. There are a variety of factors, theoretical as well as empirical, that must be considered in a study of pollution haven effects. On the theoretical side, as a country develops and inco

13、mes rise, several forces are at work simultaneously. Low environmental standards during the early stages of industrial development should attract a disproportionate amount of polluting industries, which is a composition effect . Moreover, the increased scale of production should give rise to more po

14、llution. On the other hand, as new factories replace their older and more polluting counterparts, pollution will decrease due to this “technique effect”. In particular, as multinational firms locate new plants in developing countries, they generally do so using state-of-the-art technology. Thus, the

15、 net effect of pollution standards 3 on investment and trade flows depends on the relative strength of composition, scale and technique effects (see Copeland and Taylor 2003). On the empirical side, many studies face problems such as unobserved heterogeneity, aggregation bias or possible endogeneity

16、 of proxies for environmental stringency (Levinson and Taylor 2004). Since decisions on output, inputs, and pollution abatement are made simultaneously, regressions of trade or FDI on pollution abatement costs have produced counter-intuitive results, e.g., significant pollution haven effects for les

17、s pollution intensive industries (Kalt 1998； Grossman and Krueger 1993). Compounding these problems is the use of US data on pollution intensities and abatement costs to represent environmental Environmental regulations and their enforcement in Mexico were very low until well into the 1980s. The sco

18、pe of environmental regulation has picked up only recently. The agency in charge of enforcement of regulations is Procuradura Federal de Proteccin al Ambiente (PROFEPA), whose factory inspections expanded during the 1990s from only a few per year to several thousand (Dasgupta et al. 2000). As far as

19、 compliance is concerned, in a confidential survey of 236 Mexican plants in the fall of 1995, Dasgupta et al. (2000) found that 52% of survey respondents admitted only occasional or no compliance with environmental regulations. See also Lucas et al. (1992), Hettige et al. (1996), and Mani and Wheele

20、r (1998).Pollution Control and Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico 291regulations of both developed and developing countries (Eskeland and Harrison 2003). When economy-wide data are used, the composition of GDP may change over time, thus attributing changes in pollution output to changes in environm

21、ental stringency instead of this composition effect. Finally, when many unobserved characteristics of industry, such as the labor intensity of production, are not controlled for in empirical analyses, the resulting estimates are likely to be biased. Another reason why developing countries do not ten

22、d to become pollution havens may be that the stringency of a countrys environmental standards is only one, and perhaps not the most important, factor determining comparative advantage among countries (Ederington et al. 2005). In particular, endowment of factors such as skilled labor and capital largely determine where industry is located and which goods a country will export. To the extent that heavily polluting industries also tend to be capital-intensive, the relative paucity of capital in developing countries may outweigh their abatement cost advantage (Antweiler et