Research On International Environmental Cooperation Under Regional Trade Agreement Framework

Nowadays, being primarily characterized by its internationalization, most environmental problems are not limited by national boundary, nor be able to be solved by any single nation. Meanwhile, being one kind of public goods, environment has the feature of externality. So, the whole world society has come to the common understanding, that is, international cooperation is the most efficient way to solve this kind of problem. The study is mainly on the efficiency of international environmental cooperation under the framework of international trade cooperation in Regional Trade Agreement o(RTA). It is of significant theoretical and realistic implications, for the author is committed to provide a new perspective for how to deal with the global environmental problems, especially at regional level.There comprises two parts in this dissertation:In the first part, it is proved that the practice of Greening RTA is the most efficient way to solve environmental problems in four existing international environmental cooperation frameworks. Firstly, the game theory is employed to testify that the connection of trade partnerships and environmental partnerships could improve the efficiency of international environmental cooperation. Besides, on basis of the above conclusion, the author adopts comparative analysis as another approach to further prove that Greening RTA is the most effective framework among all those linkage systems of "trade issue" and "environment issue".The main research objective in the second part is an empirical study to confirm the conclusion drawn in the first part, by taking the environmental cooperation in China-ASEAN RTA as an example. Quantities analysis method is employed to observe the necessity of international environmental cooperation under the China-ASEAN framework, which highlights the realistic need of China to hold regional environmental cooperation. In this process, the author chooses the structural effects among the three environmental effect of general trade liberalization to exemplify the necessity, to be precisely, it is the analysis of import and export of polluting products happened between China and ASEAN nations.What's more, the author has to point out that among all domestic researches on China-ASEAN RTA, this is the significant launching to explore China-ASEAN RTA from the angle of the environmental impacts; besides, investigation in the export and import of polluting products between China and individual ASEAN nation is also another contribution of this research, which can be inductive references for China's adopting different policy when dealing with the bilateral relationship. Then bylearning successful experiences from today's most greening RTA-NAFTA(NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement), combined with the present situation of China-ASEAN, the author comes up with several suggestions for the regional environmental cooperation.At last, the most important creations of this research lies in that, it gives a close observation on CAFTA's environmental cooperation by using game theory, and it tries to take an initial study of the environmental influences in CAFTA, which extends and deepens the understanding of CAFTA.