Investigating over twenty cases, this OECD report examines how environmental requirements can become trade barriers for developing countries.

Comprised of papers from leading experts, this multifaceted analysis explores the environmental requirements that have emerged from the trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization and their impact on developing markets such as South Asia. These essays address a variety of environmental and health-related standards and their prohibitive effect, discriminatory impact, and high-compliance costs--all of which hurt these developing markets. The volume concludes with an agenda of action points for governments, businesses, and international agencies to address the challenges these standards present.

Despite an increasing global awareness of environmental concerns, setting internationally binding and ambitious commitments has proven exceedingly complex. As states are seeking alternative methods to support global environmental protection, this book takes a closer look at the possibility of using national trade measures that make market access conditional on the environmental impact of the production process abroad.

This publication contains working papers from the OECD's Joint Working Party on Trade and Environment which consider key issues that have arisen in international discussions over liberalising trade in environmental goods and services. The papers explore various practical issues related to the classification of environmental goods, including "dual use" goods; set out examples of synergies between trade in environmental services and goods; and review the findings of various country studies on this issue undertaken by the OECD and other inter-governmental organisations.

Environmental Markets explains the prospects of using markets to improve environmental quality and resource conservation. No other book focuses on a property rights approach using environmental markets to solve environmental problems. This book compares standard approaches to these problems using governmental management, regulation, taxation, and subsidization with a market-based property rights approach. This approach is applied to land, water, wildlife, fisheries, and air and is compared to governmental solutions. The book concludes by discussing tougher environmental problems such as ocean fisheries and the global atmosphere, emphasizing that neither governmental nor market solutions are a panacea.

Reference tool to facilitate broader understanding and awareness of relationship between environment and trade which can then become the basis on which fair and environmentally sustainable policies and trade flows are built.