International Trade in Environmental Technologies: the historical pattern under review

Abstract

During the negotiations of the Doha Round (2001-2007), several studies reported the evident concern of developing countries with the negotiations on the liberalization of trade in environmental goods and services. This is because, given their structural dependence on technology imported from developed countries, the expected gains of this liberalization should concentrate in the latter. From this initial discussion, this article examines the international trade of environmental technologies between the years 2002 and 2013, more specifically, trade flows between OECD countries and non-member countries of the OECD, considered here as a reference to, respectively, developed and developing countries. The goal is to analyze the extent to which developed countries keep the leadership of exports and developing countries are limited to the status of environmental goods importers. The results show this pattern of trade, but the scenery changes with the rise of China and the decline of US and Japan’s share. Regarding the level of tariff protection on environmental goods, the OECD member countries remain more open, ie, they apply low average import tariffs compared to those from OECD non-member countries.