Corruption, bureaucratie et commerce international de déchets

The position of waste trade in the international trade is becoming more and more significant. In 2011, the world traded over 238 millions tons of waste in comparison to 140 millions tons in 2002. However, since the signature of the Basel Convention in 1992, countries have been asked to enforce policies to limit transboundary movement of waste. Therefore, there is a clear difference between environmental regulations severity and their enforcement. This study looks into the causes of this difference. To explain these exchanges, pollution havens hypothesis has been studied in several articles. According to this hypothesis, movements of waste are taking the direction of countries with the lower environmental standards. Besides the threat of pollution during transport, accumulation of waste in countries where there are usually neglected is a major source of concerns. We use corruption as an approximation variable for institutional weakness. Methodologically speaking, we use an econometric model based on bilateral data on waste trade and secondary data on customs bureaucracy and corruption. Evidence is found that waste flows are in destination of countries with higher corruption level than the exporting countries. In addition, we put in light that bureaucracy has a negative impact for exports but a positive one for imports. Results also indicate that the higher the bureaucracy is, the smallest is the impact of corruption on the waste trade. Thus, borders are found less permeable to corruption when economic actors describe them as more bureaucratic. Finally, we use the difference between customs declarations as a proxy of illegal trade to validate our previous results. Results found uphold our previous findings.