Search

Highlights • This paper studies the relationship between FDI and carbon emissions. • It considers the innovation, regulation, and efficiency levels of the host countries. • A Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag was applied on 21 countries divided by income level, for a period from 2001 to 2017. • FDI decreases emissions in high-income countries, while increasing them in the short run in middle-income countries, which supports the Pollution Haven Hypothesis. • This paper reveals that regulatory measures seem to be less effective in reducing emissions in high-income countries., Besides bringing countries closer, the effects of globalization can help increase the production of goods and services, and foster economic growth. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is one of the processes of globalization. One aspect of globalization that has piqued the interest of economists, is the transfer of polluting industries between countries. A principal factor in this are discrepancies of environmental regulations, and these have also been instrumental in a failure to control pollution worldwide. With this impasse in mind, a Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag was applied to evaluate the impacts of FDI on the carbon dioxide emissions of 21 countries divided by income level, for a period from 2001 to 2017. This methodology allowed the analysis of the resulting dynamics of pollution into the short-run and long-run. The characteristics of efficiency, innovation, and regulation are crucial to better understand the consequences of flows in FDI. Regulation seems to increase pollution in high-income countries, which merits further discussion. FDI decreases emissions in high-income countries, while increasing them in the short-run in middle-income countries, which supports the Pollution Haven Hypothesis. Nonetheless, the capacity of middle-income countries to absorb technology is crucial for them to benefit in the long-run. Trade openness is also highly influenced by environmental regulation in middle-income countries. Since our aim is to understand the transfer of polluting industries, an analysis of emissions from the industrial sector provided a robustness check. It also revealed that policymakers do not seem to be paying sufficient attention to innovation and controlling the environmental degradation that this sector causes.

In the era of globalization, local economic structures have not lost their significance and must be in the focus of a scientific research. Optimization problem solution could become a solid theoretical foundation for a local economic system effective functioning. To express an objective function in the analytical form in order to implement precise mathematical methods is impossible for a complex system, an economic system has proved to be such type system. Methods based on simulation are believed to be effective for finding solutions of a wide range of optimization problems. This paper details findings of the research aimed at solving optimization problem in terms of revealing optimal agent behavior in the course of exchanges in a local economic system on the basis of agent-based modeling usage.

The literature has documented how firms adjust to increased competitive pressures arising from globalization. This paper demonstrates a new margin of adjustment, namely, provision of trade credit. A simple model predicts that an increase in competitive pressures will lead exporters to provide trade credit and lower prices and that the price adjustment will be attenuated by trade credit provision. These predictions are tested in the context of an exogenous shock, the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA), a quota system governing trade in textiles and clothing until the end-2004. The analysis focuses on Turkey which was not subject to quotas in the EU and thus faced an increase in competition after the quotas on China had been removed. The results suggest that in the post-MFA period Turkish exports of products with binding MFA quotas prior to the shock saw an increase in the provision of trade credit and a drop in prices relative to the other products. There is also evidence that provision of trade credit generated a dampening effect on the price response to the increase in competition.

The paper demonstrates how ecosystem services can be viewed and studied as a social practice of value articulation. With this follows that when ecosystem services appear as objects of calculated value in decision-making they are already tainted by the social and cannot be viewed as merely reflecting an objective biophysical reality. Using urban case studies of place-based struggles in Stockholm and Cape Town, we demonstrate how values are relationally constructed through social practice. The same analysis is applied on ecosystem services. Of special interest is the TEEB Manual that uses a consultancy report on the economic evaluation of Cape Town's ‘natural assets’ to describe a step-by-step method to catalog, quantify and price certain aspects of urban nature. The Manual strives to turn the ecosystem services approach into a transportable method, capable of objectively measuring the values of urban nature everywhere, in all cities in the world. With its gesture of being universal and objective, the article suggests that the ecosystem services approach is a technology of globalization that de-historicizes and de-ecologizes debates on urbanized ecologies, effectively silencing other—and often marginalized—ways of knowing and valuing. The paper inscribes ecosystem services as social practice, as part of historical process, and as inherently political. A call is made for critical ethnographies of how ecosystem services and urban sustainability indicators are put into use to change local decision-making while manufacturing global expertise.