Did Globalization Promote Dirty Industries in Turkey?
Munise Tuba Aktaş

Abstract
Globalization issue has been broadly discussed not only in economic, social, and cultural dimensions but also in its environmental impacts on countries. Globalization has some direct and indirect impacts on the environment. One of the dimensions of globalization is economic globalization and it refers to the globalization in trade and finance. Trade globalization, whose main indicator is the rising trade shares in GDP, has indirect and direct impacts on the environment. The trade activity itself directly generates pollution. For example, transport effect is considered as direct effect on environment. Trade liberalization causes increasing transport density, which expands gas emissions deteriorating air quality. Moreover, trade globalization gives rise to indirect environmental effects such as composition (structural), scale, income-consumption, product-technology and regulatory effects. Trade globalization may give rise to a comparative advantage for developing countries in ‘dirty’ industries because of lower environmental regulations. The main objective of this study is to investigate the validity of the pollution haven effect from trade perspective for Turkey. To reveal the links between trade and environment, special attention should be paid to export and import volume and growth rates of dirty industries, and the shares of some dirty industries in total manufacturing industry in Turkey for the 1996-2014 and 1980- 2001 periods, respectively. From this point of view, the study has paid special attention to the evaluation of the impact of trade on environment. In other words, it is evaluated whether or not Turkey would experience a deteriorating quality of environment in the context of globalization. All data was received from Turkish Statistical Institute, and exports, imports data by SITC, Rev 3. It has been observed that foreign trade liberalization of Turkey has no significant negative impact on its environment, because of a modest increase in pollution intensive (so-called dirty industries) exports.

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