Two essays on trade and environment: Environmental tariffs and a study of deforestation in Thailand

Global warming, and other transnational environmental problems like ozone depletion, acid rain, and deforestation, have heightened the concern for the fate of earth's environment. The positions of different countries vary both with respect to their vulnerability and willingness to pay to avoid environmental degradation. There is a growing concern that countries might start using unilateral measures to address some of these environmental concerns. In this dissertation I examine two such important issues.; The first essay examines the implications for the use of trade measures as "weapons" to address global environmental concerns. There have been proposals in the U.S. Senate to impose an environmental tariff against foreign nations whose cost advantages stem from less stringent environmental standards than the U.S. The essay argues that trade policy measures typically are not the first best instruments for achieving environmental objectives. Simulation exercises undertaken here suggest that it is highly unlikely that countries would alter their environmental behavior because of the imposition of the proposed U.S. tariff. The analysis suggests that trade policy introduced in the fashion will have no significant impact on the patterns of world trade and pollution.; Tropical deforestation is considered to be one of the major environmental disasters of the 20th century; yet there have been few careful studies of its causes. The second essay examines the impact of roads and population pressures on deforestation in Thailand between 1976 and 1989, when the country lost 38% of its forest cover. To analyze the impact of road building, population growth, and physical factors on deforestation, a theoretical model is developed in which the amount of land cleared, number of agricultural households and size of the road network are jointly determined.; The cleared land equation is estimated using data for the 58 changwats that were forested in 1973. While I find that the number of agricultural households and road density both increase the fraction of each changwat cleared, their effects are small. The relative importance of roads and population pressures differs markedly between the North and Northeastern regions of Thailand and the Southern region and Central Plain.