The recent wave of foreign land acquisitions (FLA) has raised several concerns in terms of their environmental and social sustainability. An unexplored issue is whether pollution-haven mechanisms are driving the pattern of FLA. This paper investigates whether and how differences in environmental stringency between investing and target country affect the pattern of FLA. We estimate a panel gravity equation and use different indexes to measure the environmental stringency. Our results show that, by and large, differences in environmental stringency do affect FLA. The wider the gap in the environmental stringency between the investor and the target country, the higher is the number of firms investing abroad. Our results also show that the impact of environmental stringency differentials on FLA depends on the investor country and on corruption in the target country, and that in a number of estimations the choice over the index of stringency may be a relevant factor.

中文翻译：

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外国土地收购和环境法规：污染避风港效应是否成立？

最近一波外国土地收购（FLA）在环境和社会可持续性方面引起了一些关注。一个未探索的问题是污染避风港机制是否正在推动 FLA 的模式。本文研究了投资国和目标国之间的环境严格性差异是否以及如何影响 FLA 的模式。我们估计了一个面板重力方程，并使用不同的指标来衡量环境严格性。我们的结果表明，总的来说，环境严格性的差异确实会影响 FLA。投资者和目标国家之间的环境严格性差距越大，投资海外的公司数量就越多。