The impact of tariff liberalisation on standards for health, safety and environmental protection

Crawford School of Public Policy | Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 14 March 2017
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Coombs Seminar Room B, Coombs Building 9, Fellows Road, ANU

Speaker

Emma Aisbett, University of Hamburg.

Does tariff liberalisation cause regulatory chill by putting downward pressure on health, safety and environmental standards? Or does it cause a race to the top as governments seek to use standards as non-tariff barriers to trade? There remains remarkably little empirical evidence to answer these long-debated questions. We seek to address this lack by analysing annual country-by-industry data on notifications of changes in sanitary and phytosanitary standards by WTO members. Our results show that own-tariff liberalisation and import pressure encourage a divergence in standards across countries. Regulatory chill in countries which have a low rate of notifications suggests a stuck-at-the-bottom problem, while countries with a high rate of notifications appear to race to the top.

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