Does trade openness promote multilateral environmental cooperation?

All in all, similar to Fredriksson and Gaston (1999 and 2000), but based on a much wider sample of Multilateral Environmental Agreements and a broader set of proxies for trade openness, this article finds some evidence that general trade openness promotes multilateral environmental cooperation. As countries are likely to become more and more open to trade this could have a positive effect on multilateral environmental cooperation. However, one cannot rely on increased trade openness having a strong positive effect on multilateral environmental cooperation efforts. Looking across the MEAs it is striking that general export openness plays most of a role in exactly those treaties that contain elaborate trade restrictive measures, namely the Rotterdam Convention, the Montreal Protocol and CITES. General export openness might therefore only promote multilateral environmental cooperation in those cases where significant trade-relevant provisions are at stake. Whether specific trade interests promote or hinder countries' willingness to cooperate in MEAs depends on whether the MEA under consideration is likely to threaten or accommodate the interests of exporters. Fossil fuel exporters have much to lose from the Kyoto Protocol, hence they are less likely to have signed it. The same is possibly true for countries producing crops that are genetically modified in the case of the Biosafety Protocol. For the Montreal Protocol and CITES, however, specific export interests might have helped to bring about multilateral environmental cooperation. For successful MEAs to be negotiated, signed and speedily ratified political commitment by the community of nation states is necessary. Trade openness might help as this article has tried to demonstrate. Clearly, however, more research is warranted on this important issue. Questions worth investigating include whether this paper's results remain valid for other MEAs and for other indicators or proxy variables for multilateral environmental cooperation, however difficult finding these might be.