Globalisation:
Eco-Trade

The conflicts at the last WTO meeting in Seattle between supporters and opponents of further trade liberalisation clearly indicated that the environmental and social impacts of globalisation will be among the key political issues in the coming decade.

It is therefore urgently needed to elaborate and implement policy strategies, which (a) realise the principle of integrating environmental protection requirements into trade policies in the EU and (b) enable further integration of the World market in an environmentally sustainable manner.

The overall objective of the research carried out in the framework of this research area is to provide decision-makers with policy strategies capable for realising sustainable development in the trade and environment relationship between the European Union (EU) and all other regions of the world.

In order to create an empirical base for the policy research, the project will analyse the interrelation of trade flows and resource consumption by assessing material flows along the trans-border life-cycle of export products and services.

Especially from the perspective of southern countries the projects will perform research on innovation on the levels of the final products, the process methods as well as the involved institutions, with the goal to identify export production patterns with increased resource productivity.
Based on these empirical studies of the present trade relations and the policy and innovation research undertaken in this project, scenarios for sustainable trade and environment relations between the EU and other world regions will be elaborated.

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Stefan Giljum