ABSTRACT. The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.

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This paper uses a monopolistic competitive framework to study the impact of trade liberalization on local and global emissions. We focus on the interplay of asymmetric emission taxes and the home market effect and show how a large-market advantage can counterbalance a high emission tax, so that trade liberalization leads firms to move to the large high-tax economy. Global emissions decrease when trade is liberalized in this case. We then simulate the model with endogenous taxes. The larger country, which has the advantage of the home market effect, will be able to set a higher Nash emission tax than its smaller trade partner, yet still maintain its manufacturing base. As a result, a pollution haven will typically not arise in this case as trade is liberalized. However, global emission increases as a result of international tax competition, which underscores that the importance of international cooperation increases as trade becomes freer.

China, environmental policy, international waste trade, recycling 1 | INTRODUCTION The global trade of waste and scrap is becoming increasingly a flow of waste from developed to developing countries, growing 500% over the two decades since 1992 (Kellenberg, 2015). Proponents of the waste trade maintain that importers can benefit by gaining access to cheap, recycled input materials. Opponents claim that waste importers lack the capacity to effectively manage waste imports. By exporting to these countries, the costs of proper disposal are avoided resulting in "waste havens", which are a special case of the pollution haven. China is by far the world's largest importer of non-hazardous waste, accounting for 22% of the global waste imports in 2014 (UN Comtrade, 2016). This type of waste import is slated for recycling and/or recovery and thereby serves as an input to production. Hence, this type of trade should be in principle no different from trade in intermediate inputs. However, poor quality (e.g., contaminated) waste shipments and waste smuggling were a problem. A concern was the cost of sorting imposed on domestic manufacturing, and the associated environmental impact of the unwanted wastes (Flower, 2016). In response to the problem of poor quality wastes and smuggling, China adopted policies that target the flow of unwanted, poor quality wastes that are costly to recover or dispose. As part of the response, China launched Operation Green Fence (OGF) from 1 February to 31 November 2013. The main objective of the 10-month-long policy intervention was to enforce waste trade policies already adopted by China and thereby restrict illegal hazardous waste imports. In practice, this entailed a marked increase in inspection efforts and policing activity at the border. This paper assesses the impact of OGF on the global, non-hazardous waste trade. 1 We study the non-hazardous waste trade because China has a ban on all hazardous waste imports. We focus on two 1 The international trade of hazardous waste is of course also an important and related issue; see Baggs (2009) and Kellenberg (2015) for a description of this type of waste trade.

It is suggested that trade measures should be used to induce exporters to adopt more ambitious climate policy and reduce global emissions. However, a tariff and the exporter's emission tax are likely substitutes, which would undermine the rationale for these trade measures. This paper examines incentives to regulate the climate under border carbon adjustment (BCA), defined as an import duty of a magnitude determined by the difference in emission taxes between trade partners. Unlike a tariff, a BCA can induce the exporter to adopt a higher tax, suggesting that the BCA and tariff are not equally effective at targeting global emission levels and that the features of the border measure matter in assessing the effectiveness of trade policy in targeting global emissions.