ECOLOGlCAL EC‘ONOMICS ELSEVIER Ecological Economics 9 (1994) 1-12 Trade, environment and development: the issues in perspective Paul Ekins a,*, Carl Folke b, Robert Costanza ’ a Department of Economics, Birkbeck College, University of London, 7-15 Gresse Street, London WlP IPA, UK h The Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Suences, Box 50005, and Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, S-10405 Stockholm, Sweden ’ Maryland International Institute for Ecological Economics, Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies. Unuversity of Maryland, Box 38, Solomons, MD 20688-0038, USA Abstract This special issue on trade and the environment brings together a number of papers that are constructively critical of the conventional economic wisdom on the topic. We think that this criticism is warranted because of the decidedly uncritical way in which ‘free trade’ has been advocated in much of the literature, and especially in policy. The papers analyse the validity of the underlying assumptions on which the conventional wisdom is based, and provide suggestions for ways to facilitate trade that is also adequately protective of the environment, sustainability, and other social values. In this introductory piece we discuss trade, the environment, and sustainability, summarizing arguments in the papers included in this issue, and adding a few additional points not covered by them. Key words: Free trade; Sustainability 1. Introduction During the Second Meeting of the Interna- tional Society for Ecological Economics, ‘Invest- ing in Natural Capital; a Prerequisite for Sustain- ability’, held at Stockholm University, Sweden, in August 1992, the session with contributed papers on trade and environment gathered a large crowd, was very successful, and stimulated much debate on this very timely and important topic. Two of * Corresponding author. the papers in this issue by Ropke and by Steininger were presented at that ISEE confer- ence session on trade and environment. The oth- ers were submitted independently to Ecological Economics, and all contributions have been re- viewed according to the normal peer review pro- cedures of the journal. In this introductory commentary we summarise issues which we think are of importance for a constructive debate on the role of trade in rela- tion to environment and sustainability. We exam- ine the potential gains from trade from this per- spective, and in the context of the criticism and 0921-8009/94/$07.00 0 1994 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0921-8009(93)E0058-0