Law Commons^™

The Next Generation Of Trade And Environment Conflicts: The Rise Of Green Industrial Policy, Mark Wu, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

A major shift is transforming the trade and environment field, triggered by governments’ rising use of industrial policies to spark nascent renewable energy industries and to restrict exports of certain minerals in the face of political economy constraints. While economically distorting, these policies do produce significant economic and environmental benefits. At the same time, they often violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, leading to increasingly harsh conflicts between trading partners.

This Article presents a comprehensive analysis of these emerging conflicts, arguing that they represent a sharp break from past trade and environment disputes. It examines the causes of the shift …