What accounts for the clean-up of US manufacturing: technology or international trade?

Vox: What accounts for the clean-up of US manufacturing: technology or international trade?

Conclusion

What is the bottom line? Increased net imports of polluting goods account for about 70 percent of the composition-related decline in US manufacturing pollution. The composition effect in turn explains about 40 percent of the overall decline in pollution from US manufacturing. Putting these two findings together, international trade can explain at most 28 percent of the clean-up of US manufacturing.

Why should we care?

If the 75% reduction in pollution from US manufacturing resulted from increased international trade, the pundits and protestors might have a case. Environmental improvements might be said to have imposed large, unmeasured environmental costs on the countries from which those goods are imported. And more importantly, the improvements in the US would not be replicable by all countries indefinitely, because the poorest countries in the world will never have even poorer countries from which to import their pollution-intensive goods. The US clean-up would simply have been the result of the US coming out ahead in an environmental zero-sum game, merely shifting pollution to different locations. However, if the US pollution reductions come from technology, nothing suggests those improvements cannot continue indefinitely and be repeated around the world. The analyses here suggest that most the pollution reductions have come from improved technology, that the environmental concerns of antiglobalization protesters have been overblown, and that the pollution reduction achieved by US manufacturing will replicable by other countries in the future.

Comments

[phil_style]

And therein lies a strong argument against the 'air-miles' fallacy. Why not shift goods from places where they can be produced more efficently, provided that efficency is resultant from lower resource inputs & outputs and not just wage, tax or legal compliance costs.

It might still be more environmentally safe (in terms of total resource inputs and emission outputs) to produce meat in NZ and ship it to the UK, than to produce it in the UK - for example.

As a caveat, one of the problems with efficiency gains through technology is that, by reducing input resources, the cost of production is reduced. Therefore, supply can increase, and the market price would normally drop. The result is more product on the market. So while the per-unit environmental cost is reduces, the total number of units being produced rises, and the total environmental cost remains the same.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Its all about trade offs, isn't it? I think the driving issue is that natural resource inputs usually are not the major cost input. Labor and technology (i.e. capital) are usually the big costs. Between advanced nations like NZ and UK this may not be a major problem. But between, say, Kenya and the UK there are major differences.