Richard Jiang on the potential role of export duties in China’s environmental policy
On 26 and 27 May 2017, Richard Jiang, PhD candidate at the Europa Institute, participated as a speaker in the ninth annual meeting of the Society for Environmental Law and Economics at Worcester College, University of Oxford.
Jiang was invited to present on the potential role of export duties in China’s environmental policy. He showed that although China may largely impose export duties for an industrial purpose in the past, the development of China’s environmental policy in the context of China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) suggested that export duties might play an important role to tackle carbon leakage, the situation in which states introduce carbon pricing policies only to see their energy-intensive industries shift production to states that have weaker or no such controls. In this context, it is necessary to find a legal solution to provide China with a desirable policy space to use export duties in the WTO.