Drivers of international shipments of hazardous waste: the role of policy and technology endowment

Using a gravity model for trade, this work analyzes the factors influencing the patterns of international hazardous waste flows, relying on newly available data reported in the E-PRTR (European Pollutant Release and Transfer Registry) for EU-OECD countries over the period 2007 to 2014. Exploiting a consolidated empirical framework (Kellenberg, 2012), we test two empirical hypotheses: firstly, we explicitly assess if, according to the pollution heaven hypothesis (PHH), the relative levels of environmental policies across countries are an important determinant of hazardous waste trade, and secondly, we test if technological specialization, proxied here by a technology-specific patent stock, can be considered as a pull factor capable to influence the patterns of international trade of hazardous waste.