Trade and environmental diplomacy: Strategic options for ASEAN

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 70, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 351-371

  Montes, Manuel F ^a   Magno, Francisco A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASEAN; ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES; GATT; INTERNATIONAL TRADE; NAFTA; STRATEGIC APPROACH; TRADE AGREEMENT;

ASIA, (SOUTHEAST);

EID: 0031397924     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2761027     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. "Joint Communique of the Twenty-fifth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting," in ASEAN Documents Series, 1992-1994 (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 1994), pp. 1-11. The original members of ASEAN when it was formed in 1967 were Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Brunei joined in 1984 and Vietnam was admitted in 1995.
2. Manuel Montes, "The Effects of ASEAN Trade Integration in a Macroeconomic Model of ASEAN, United States and Japan," in Asia-Pacific Economies: 1990s and Beyond, Research in Asian Economic Studies, vol. 5 (New Jersey: JAI Press, 1993), pp. 319-40.
3. In the standard economic framework, any movement towards trade liberalization is welfareincreasing. History, as corroborated by recent economic models, cautions against such a monotonic view of free trade. See Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991).
4. The results of the Uruguay round, completed after the establishment of AFTA, include agricultural trade, services, market access, and intellectual property which already go beyond the purview of AFTA, which only covers trade in manufactured goods.
5. AFTA is seen as a way to increase the coherence and guarantee the future of ASEAN in the face of diminished relevance in the post-cold war era. See ASEAN Free Trade Area: Trading Bloc or Building Block, East Asia Analytical Unit, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia (1994).
6. At its inception, ASEAN was officially projected as an attempt at economic cooperation. However, it has been argued that ASEAN itself was not established primarily as a means to faster economic cooperation. It was a matter of convenience that economic cooperation was adopted as its formal objective to provide an excuse for the countries to get together in a loose political arrangement. It would not have been possible for ASEAN to take off in 1967 had it been couched with political underpinnings. See B. A. Hamzah, ASEAN Relations with Dialogue Partners (Kuala Lumpur: Selagor Darul Ehsan, 1989), p. 5.
7. Jagdish Bhagwati, "Trade and the Environment: The False Conflict," Durwood Zaelke, Paul Orbuch, and Robert Housman, eds., Trade and the Environment: Law, Economics, and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), pp. 159-90.
8. A deeper institutional precondition for deriving direct policy implications from a separationist approach is the existence of stable property rights for most commodities. While it is possible to be sanguine about legally assigning property rights over a host of local resources, waiting for the development of economic and human resources and the emergence of a coercive force at the local level to make the assigned rights enforceable is another matter.
9. Lyuba Zarsky, "Lessons of Liberalization in Asia: From Structural Adjustment to Sustainable Development," Report to the Asian Development Bank, Office of the Environment, April 1993. The same issue would apply to the potential liberalization of coal trade which would have the effect of raising domestic prices in developing countries as has been suggested under a separationist viewpoint. See Jane Drake-Brockman and Kym Anderson, "The Entwining of Trade Policy and Environment Issues: Implications for APEC" (Paper prepared for the conference Which Way APEC? American Committee for Asian Economic Studies and the Indonesian Economic Association, Bali, August 29-September 1, 1994).
10. Lyuba Zarsky, "Lessons of Liberalization in Asia: From Structural Adjustment to Sustainable Development," Report to the Asian Development Bank, Office of the Environment, April 1993. The same issue would apply to the potential liberalization of coal trade which would have the effect of raising domestic prices in developing countries as has been suggested under a separationist viewpoint. See Jane Drake-Brockman and Kym Anderson, "The Entwining of Trade Policy and Environment Issues: Implications for APEC" (Paper prepared for the conference Which Way APEC? American Committee for Asian Economic Studies and the Indonesian Economic Association, Bali, August 29-September 1, 1994).
11. This assumption is heavily conditioned by Anglo-Saxon traditions of property rights and contrasts with many communal property traditions in other areas of the world. It is true that even in traditional areas the onset of modern markets and trade beyond subsistence production has led to rapid natural resource depletion. While individual behavior is directly responsible for rapid resource depletion, it is not clear if such behavior would exist except under the possibility of converting such resources into other assets which marketization provides.
12. The term "cooperative" in the neoclassical usage only denotes extending beyond individual price-taking and institution-taking behavior. These are effectively social decisions which are presumably determined democratically in Western societies.
13. Perhaps the most highly putative spillover issue relates to the management of the earth's human population, especially because it often involves theology and beliefs about the purpose of human life. Even if one recognizes the public goods aspect of providing social services, population management can involve the imposition of preferences over the size of the world's population on individuals who do not share the same preferences.
14. Tom Wathen, "A Guide to Trade and the Environment," in Zaelke, Orbuch, and Housman, eds., Trade and the Environment, p. 3.
15. The GATT panel ruling against the U.S. embargo on Mexican tuna under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was based in part on the principle that environmental laws cannot be applied to territories outside the legal jurisdiction of a country.
16. Charles Arden-Clarke, "An Action Agenda for Trade Policy Reform to Support Sustainable Development: A United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Follow-up," in Zaelke, Orbuch, and Housman, eds., Trade and Environment, pp. 71-81.
17. Herman Daly and Robert Goodland, "An Ecological-Economic Assessment of Deregulation of International Commerce under GATT, Part II," Population and Environment, vol. 15, no. 6 (July 1994), pp. 477-503.
18. Ibid. p. 480.
19. See Robert Repetto, "Complementarities between Trade and Environmental Policies," in Zaelke, Orbuch, and Housman, eds., Trade and the Environment, pp. 159-90; and Lyuba Zarsky, "Borders in the Biosphere," Nautilus Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 1 (August 1993).
20. See Robert Repetto, "Complementarities between Trade and Environmental Policies," in Zaelke, Orbuch, and Housman, eds., Trade and the Environment, pp. 159-90; and Lyuba Zarsky, "Borders in the Biosphere," Nautilus Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 1 (August 1993).
21. Charles Pearson, "Trade and Environment Nexus: An Analysis," ASEAN Update (March 1994), p. 13.
22. Robert Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Lavel Games," International Organization, vol. 42 (Summer 1988), pp. 427-60.
23. Andrew Moravcsik, "Integrating International and Domestic Theories of International Bargaining," in Peter Evans, Harold Jacobson, and Robert Putnam, eds., Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 3-42.
24. Environmental Cooperation: An Approach to Development (Report prepared by the UNEP Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, 1983).
25. Annual Report of the ASEAN Standing Committee, 1980-81 (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 1981), p. 19.
26. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed's statement, made in 1992, that more forests can be saved by preventing forest fires rather than boycotting tropical timber illustrates the national development interest in the timber issue in ASEAN.
27. For instance, the British and Dutch governments openly came out in support of a proposal made by environmental groups to the International Timber Trade Organization (ITTO) to label timber in order to show whether or not it came from sustainably managed forests.
28. ASEAN Documents Series, 1992-1994, p. 33.
29. The Singapore Declaration of 1992, which was agreed upon by the ASEAN heads of state during the Fourth ASEAN Summit Meeting, emphasized the responsibility of developed countries to assist developing nations by providing them new financial resources, as well as access to environmentally sound technology at concessional and preferential terms.
30. ASEAN Documents Series, 1992-1994, p. 33.
31. ASEAN Fisheries Federation, ASEAN Fisheries Federation Sixth Council Meeting and Business Conference (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 1994).
32. For example, see ASEAN Timberlink, vol. 6, no. 10 (October 1993).
33. States are more inclined to participate in environmental protection efforts when the costs of compliance are minor. See Detlef Sprinz and Tapani Vaahtoranta, "The Interest-Based Explanation of International Environmental Policy," International Organization, vol. 48, no. 1 (1994), pp. 77-105.
34. Marc Innes-Brown and Mark Valencia, "Thailand's Resource Diplomacy in Indochina and Myanmar," Contemporary Southeast Asia, vol. 14, no. 4 (March 1993).
35. ASEAN has managed to become a significant player in security discussions in the region through the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). However, security issues might have a more unified domestic constituency, unlike the environment, and an easier area for ASEAN to address at the international level.