Pollution Terms of Trade (PTT): Environmental Exchange Indicator

Jean-Marie Grether and Nicole A. Mathys's indicator measures the ratio of pollution content per dollar of exports to pollution content per dollar of imports for a country. The Pollution Terms of Trade (PTT) index, introduced by Werner Antweiler, is inversely correlated with net environmental gains from trade, where a value below 1 suggests a country specializes in 'clean' goods. The dataset is used to investigate the 'pollution haven' hypothesis, where countries with laxer environmental regulations may attract polluting industries.

Use Cases

• Testing the 'pollution haven' hypothesis by comparing PTT indices across countries with different regulatory stringency.
• Assessing net environmental gains from trade for a country based on its calculated PTT value.
• Analyzing the specialization of countries in 'clean' versus 'dirty' goods production using the export-import pollution ratio.

Strengths

• Cross-platform presence on figshare and dataverse signals established academic use.
• Dataset is associated with FERDI (Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international), a recognized research organization.
• Has a clear, open license (GPL 2.0+) on its primary figshare listing.

Limitations

• Column names and a precise row count are not provided in any source, limiting understanding of the data structure.
• Author attribution conflict: one figshare entry lists Issakha THIAM as author, while others list Jean-Marie Grether.
• Metadata on the dataverse platform is incomplete, lacking file size, row count, and license information.

Provenance

Source

FERDI Research Data, authored by Jean-Marie Grether and Nicole A. Mathys.

Collection Method

Calculated indicator based on trade and pollution intensity data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-05 17:18:02 (figshare and dataverse).

Geography

Likely contains country-level data, but specific coverage is not stated.