FREE trade is not a one-way ticket to pollution purgatory, claims a World
Bank report. Many greens, and some economists, say free trade encourages
industry to relocate to countries with lax anti-pollution laws, mostly in the
developing world. To maintain competitiveness, rich nations join this downward
slide towards more liberal attitudes to pollution, dubbed “the race to the
bottom”.
But last week, free-trade advocates at the World Bank hit back with new
research suggesting that this logic does not hold in the real world. David
Wheeler of the Bank’s development research group has found that the three
countries to which…
