Environmental Quality and International Trade

Environmental problems are currently a matter of international interest and concern for a wide variety of reasons ranging from those which are rather general and even vague to others which are concrete and sometimes very pressing.1 There are, hopefully, more than a few people who are concerned about the welfare of their fellow man wherever he may be; moreover, there is an evident feeling of “one-worldness” resulting from an increasing degree of interdependence in several spheres, including the economic and the cultural. Further, the developed countries feel that they can learn useful lessons from one another about how to cope with environmental problems which are quite similar from country to country. These problems usually result from high population densities combined with large and rapidly growing per capita production and consumption which are often brought about by the use of technologies that generate large amounts of destructive residual materials. There is also an almost universal absence of satisfactory institutions for collective management of a number of “common property resources” including the air mantle, watercourses, and other large ecological systems.