A5 Agricultural trade policies, productivity, and the environment

SP A5 focuses on the environmental effects of agricultural trade, and the role of trade policies for sustainability outcomes. Globalized food systems are connected through trade, and consumer choices in one part of the world are connected to environmental impacts elsewhere. We will analyze trade flows between developing and high-income countries with quantitative modeling approaches to analyze interactions between agricultural production and the environment. In combination with secondary data on environmental goods and “bads”, effects on domestic environmental quality, and environmental flows are disentangled. The pathways along which environmentally-related variables possibly affect trading patterns and decompositions of total factor productivity (TFP) growth, accounting for undesirable outputs, are additional foci of this SP.

Possible dissertation topics:


  • Effects of sustainability standards on the net carbon content of tropical commodities
  • Total resource productivity growth and international trade in agrifood products: How environmental regulation changes trading patterns
  • Decomposition of welfare effects of agricultural, trade, and environmental policies

  • Leading PI:
    Bernhard Brümmer

    Doctoral researcher of the first cohort:
    Petros Mkandawire