Edited by Geert Van Calster and Denise Prévost
Chapter 19: Trade in environmental goods, with focus on climate-friendly goods and technologies
The global market for environmental goods and services (EGS) is huge and has been growing rapidly. Depending on the definitions and coverage, its size is estimated to be at least about US$ 700 billion in 2006 by Environmental Business International (Japan Ministry of the Environment, 2008) and as much as £3.046 trillion in 2007/08 by the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (2009). This high end of the estimated market size accounted for about 10 percent of global GDP. Negotiations on ‘the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services’ mandated under Paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration (DMD) are to promote further market development of global environmental goods and services, by expanding current supply and technological upgrades of goods and services and making them affordable to consumers. Given the growing consensus that climate change has the potential to seriously damage our natural environment and affect the global economy, this mandate offers a good opportunity to put climate-friendly goods and services on a fast track to liberalization to address one of the world’s most pressing long-term threats to future prosperity and security.
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