Smog and Trade: Alleviating the Economic Impact of Air Pollution Through Trade Policy

Abstract

This paper explores how trade policy can be harnessed to combat air pollution. By focusing on the economic perspective, it addresses environmental challenges raised by industrial sector and fossil fuels consumption. While doing the case study on a South Asian country, Pakistan, it uses economic and trade policies, past and present, linking them with smog to propose a solution. A solution, that leverages those policy to incentivize the use of green technology and renewable resources in order to promote the green standards and mitigate pollution. It further outlines how different economic policies like removing import barriers, providing subsidies etc., can be proven as a legitimate solution to economic growth while keeping focus on the initial case: to get rid of air pollution and its effects. This paper also tries to bridge the gap between the existing knowledge and their practical implementation and while paper retains combating smog as its main focus, the positive influence on economic scale can be witnessed as complimentary reward as well.