Environmental Economics and Sustainability

9 GLOBALIZATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NEW EMPIRICAL PANEL DATA EVIDENCE

Maoliang Bu

Nanjing University School of Business & Hopkins-Nanjing Center

Chin-Te Lin

Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne Graduate School of Mathematics

Bing Zhang

State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse School of the Environment Nanjing University & School of Government Nanjing University

1. Introduction

In recent years, globalization and its effects on the environment have garnered enormous attention in connection with the heated debate over the so-called ‘pollution haven hypothesis (PHH)’, which argues that pollution-intensive industries will move from developed countries with stringent environmental regulations to developing countries with lax environmental regulations (Eskeland and Harrison, 2003; Copeland and Taylor, 2004; Bu et al., 2011; Cole et al., 2011). As a phenomenon, globalization has thus far proven to be too complicated to be examined through the lens of any single of its facets (such as its economic, cultural and political facets), thus indicating that a multi-angle spatial vision must be constructed (Held, 1999; Held and McGrew, 2003).

Previous studies of this subject in the economics literature have generally suffered from two main constraints. First, most studies rarely consider a sufficiently large number of countries, with most samples consisting of one or a few countries that do not provide a general global picture. Second, regarding the dimension of globalization, ...