This paper reviews arguments and evidence on the impact of globalization on the environment, then presents evidence on production and international trade flows in five heavily polluting industries for 52 countries over the period 1981-98. A new decomposition of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) according to geographical origin reveals a delocalization to the South for all heavily polluting industries except non-ferrous metals that exhibits South-North delocalization in accordance with factor-abundance driven response to a reduction in trade barriers. Panel estimation of a gravity model of bilateral trade on the same data set reveals that, on average, polluting industries have higher barriers-to-trade costs (except non-ferrous metals with significantly lower barriers to trade) and little evidence of delocalization in response to a North-South regulatory gap

This paper proposes a novel and simple measure of the world's economic centre of gravity. Over the recent decades, this centre has shifted towards Asia, but is still located in Europe.

The paper uses a three-factor (capital, low-and high-skill labor), two-household (low-and high-skill individuals), two-sector trade model to analyze the determinants of voter attitudes towards immigration under direct democracy, and to identify factors that would be coherent with both the observed increase in the skilled-unskilled wage differential and the stiffening attitudes towards low-skill capital-poor immigration. If the import-competing sector is intensive in the use of low-skill labor, and capital is the middle factor, an improvement in the terms of trade or neutral technical progress in the exporting sector leads nationals to oppose immigration of capital-poor low-skill households. An increase in income inequality is also likely to stiffen attitudes towards this type of capital-poor, low-skill immigration prevalent in Europe until recently.

Combining two data sources on emissions with value-added and employment data, this paper constructs six data bases on sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) intensities that vary across countries, sectors and years. This allows us to perform a growth decomposition exercise where the change in world manufacturing emissions is decomposed into scale, composition and technique effects. The sample covers the period 1990-2000, and includes 62 countries that account for 76% of world-wide emissions. While manufacturing activity has increased by a rough 10% (scale effect), we estimate that emissions have fallen by about 10%, thanks to the adoption of cleaner production techniques (the technique effect) and a small shift towards cleaner industries (between-sector effect). As output and productivity gains have been biased towards large emerging countries like China and India, which are both clean in terms of emissions per unit labor and dirty in terms of emissions per dollar, the sign and magnitude of the between-country effect depends on the choice regarding the scaling factor (−2% for employment, +25% for value-added, with a corresponding adjustment of the technique effect). The paper also shows that these estimates are robust to changes in aggregation across entities (regions or countries) and across industries, and that composition changes are correlated with changes in prices and trade intensities.Keywords Manufacturing activities · Bottom-up approach · SO 2 emissions Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

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