Essays in environmental policies in the presence of international trade

The goal of the three essays in this dissertation is to understand better how international trade affects governments' ability to remedy environmental problems. The first essay uses a North-South model with property right differences and resource dynamics to study the effects of trade on resource use and welfare. The second essay considers limited cooperation in international environmental agreements in a static framework and the third essay considers dynamics of cooperation.; The first essay shows that autarky is likely to Pareto-dominate free trade in the long run when the environment is quite fragile, and the result is reversed when the environment is quite resilient. Trade may cause an environmentally poor country to "drag down" its richer trading partner, or cause both countries to degrade their stocks when these would be preserved under autarky. Alternatively, trade may enable the environmentally richer country to "pull up" its partner, or cause both countries to preserve their stocks when these would be degraded under autarky. These results rationalize the positions of environmentalists and free-traders. The direction of trade may change over time, but in steady states it is either inefficient or indeterminate. In the former case, a switch to autarky would increase global welfare.; The second essay shows that governments' desire to ameliorate environmental problems may conflict with other goals. Policy levels which balance different objectives can be altered by policy changes in other countries. A decrease in the importance of the pollution problem, or an increase in its global extent, increase the likelihood that tighter environmental regulations in one region induce laxer policies elsewhere. The transboundary character and the importance of environmental externalities also affect the amount of cooperation needed to improve members' welfare in a coalition. More global pollution problems require a larger coalition. However, the critical coalition size may be larger or smaller for more severe problems.; The third essay considers limited cooperation in environmental agreements when the environmental impacts of production are realized in future. We show that the conventional wisdom on "free-riding" needs to be modified for certain types of pollution problems when the future is considered important. There exist circumstances in which a sufficient level of free-riding is essential for member nations' welfare to improve.