Economic Development, Accelerated Tariff Liberalization & The Environment

Despite claims to the contrary, evidence points to the fact that economic development is ultimately beneficial to the environment. The issues were first officially linked in the public's mind with the publication of Our Common Future (the Brundtland Report) in 1987, which provided much of the intellectual framework for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development's 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio De Janeiro.

In the five years since the publication of the Brundtland Report, economists have consistently found that:

• At the national level, rising incomes lead to improved access to basic sanitation, easing environmental pressures;
• Evidence indicates that as per-capita real GDP increases, there is a decline in the emission of certain harmful pollutants, a relationship known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve;
• Countries with higher GDP levels tend to have more sophisticated environmental policies and invest more in pollution abatement equipment.

As a force of economic development, international trade can contribute to these environmental benefits. The fear that less-developed countries will systematically lower their environmental policies to attract polluting industries from countries with more stringent environmental policies has not been borne out by the evidence.

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