Multilateral environmental agreements and the WTO

•WTO/GATT rules may limit participation in multilateral environmental agreements.•We test this empirically while addressing self-selection and misclassification.•To do so, we use a partial identification approach.•WTO membership is found to inhibit MEA participation among non-OECD countries.

Addressing many environmental problems requires international cooperation. However, rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO) may deter participation in multilateral environmental agreements. Using a partial identification approach, we obtain strictly negative bounds for non-OECD countries in the WTO era.