compared to fluctuations in environmental pollutants and public health conditions in a region. To
create the model a retrospective analysis was conducted on trade measures that currently exist in
the economics and political science literature. The research on trade measures has demonstrated
a great deal of fluctuations in preexisting measures of trade openness. This has led us to develop
a new measure of trade openness based on dynamic factors of trade regulation as examined in
Hiscox and Kastner’s (2003) econometrics model.
The environmental literature also lacks a generalizable model to test effects of trade
openness. A great deal of the existing literature focuses on the economic costs and utility values
of environmental policies.
2
The few case studies that exist on the impact of trade variables on
the environment have methodological flaws because they do not accurately code for control
variables of population fluctuations or other intervening variables of stabilization reforms such as
privatization.
The literature on the direct effects of trade openness on public health is virtually
nonexistent. The research that exists is focused on case study selection and is limited due to data
reliability. The cases of Mexico and Rosario, Argentina will be analyzed to look at the direct
impact of trade liberalization on health outcomes.
The study hopes to fill a gap in the theoretical literature on trade and the environment by
first providing a generalizible variable of trade openness which has not been derived in earlier
studies. Previous studies in the areas of environmental degradation have been inconclusive and
conducted solely as case study analyses. Therefore our measure of trade openness will be tested
against environmental and public health variations using previous measures created by the World
Health organization and GEMS AIR database. The results that will be derived from this model
2
For a good review see Cropper 1992 Environmental Economics: A survey - Journal of
Economic Literature 30: 675-740.
Convention