1,721,078 research outputs found
00-05 "Getting the Prices Wrong: The Limits of Market-Based Environmental Policy."
Get PDFMarket based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world's environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an "efficient" allocation of society's resources. As a result, many contemporary policymakers advocate rolling back regulations in order to let the market protect the environment. There is a fundamental distinction between the use of the market as a tool to help achieve society's goals, and as a blueprint for society's goals; the market is a reasonable policy tool but not a reasonable blueprint. The market as blueprint fails because there are significant public purposes that cannot be achieved by prices and markets alone. Five major arguments show that getting the prices right is often a narrow or meaningless objective; society may intentionally and appropriately choose to "get the prices wrong" in order to pursue more important goals.
00-03 "Trade Liberalization and Pollution Intensive Industries in Developing Countries: A Partial Equilibrium Approach."
Get PDFEconomic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution-intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the "pollution haven" hypothesis, is much discussed in theory, but finds only ambiguous support in empirical research to date. Methodologies used for research on trade and environment differ widely; many are difficult to apply to practical policy questions. We develop a simple, partial equilibrium model explicitly designed to analyze the effects of a change in trade policy. Our model analyzes the relative concentrations of "clean" and "dirty" industries in two nations or regions, before and after the policy change. While lacking the theoretical rigor and mathematical intricacy of other modeling methods, our approach has the advantages of transparency and accessibility to a broad range of analysts and policy makers.
"Waste in the Inner City: Asset or Assault?"
Get PDFrecycling, pollution, environment, environmental discrimination, environmental policy
06-05 Can Climate Change Save Lives? A comment on “Economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: Human health”
Get PDFIn a recent article in this journal, Francesco Bosello, Roberto Roson, and Richard Tol make the surprising prediction that the first stages of global warming will, on balance, save a large number of lives. Bosello et al. fail to substantiate this remarkable estimate, and they make multiple mistaken or misleading assumptions. They rely on research that identifies a simple empirical relationship between temperature and mortality, but ignores the countervailing effect of human adaptation to gradual changes in average temperature. While focusing on small changes in average temperatures, they ignore the important health impacts of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes. They extrapolate this pattern far beyond the level that is apparently supported by their principal sources, and introduce an arbitrary assumption that may bias the result toward finding benefits from warming.
00-01 "Still Dead After All These Years: Interpreting the Failure of General Equilibrium Theory."
Get PDF06-02 "The Unbearable Lightness of Regulatory Costs"
Get PDFWill unbearable regulatory costs ruin the US economy? This specter haunts official Washington, just as fears of communism once did. Once again, the prevailing rhetoric suggests, an implacable enemy of free enterprise puts our prosperity at risk. Like anti-communism in its heyday, anti-command-and-control-ism serves to narrow debate,promoting the unregulated laissez-faire economy as the sole acceptable goal and standard for public policy. Fears of the purported costs of regulation have been used to justify a sweeping reorganization of regulatory practice, in which the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is empowered to, and often enough does, reject regulations from other agencies on the basis of intricate, conjectural, economic calculations. This article argues for a different perspective: what is remarkable about regulatory costs is not their heavy economic burden, but rather their lightness. Section 1 identifies two general reasons to doubt that there is a significant trade-off between prosperity and regulation: first, regulatory costs are frequently too small to matter; and second, even when the costs are larger, reducing them would not always improve economic outcomes. The next three sections examine evidence on the size and impact of regulatory costs. Section 2 presents cost estimates for a particularly ambitious and demanding environmental regulation, REACH -- the European Union's new chemicals policy. Section 3 discusses academic research on the "pollution haven" hypothesis, i.e. the assertion that firms move to developing countries in search of looser environmental regulations. Section 4 reviews the literature on ex ante overestimation of regulatory costs, including the recent claims by OMB that costs are more often underestimated (and/or benefits overestimated) in advance. Turning to the economic context, Section 5 explains why macroeconomic constraints may eliminate any anticipated economic gains from deregulation. Section 6 introduces a further economic argument against welfare gains from deregulation, based on the surprising evidence that unemployment decreases mortality. Section 7 briefly concludes.
05-01 "The Shrinking Gains from Trade: A Critical Assessment of Doha Round Projections"
Get PDFComputable general equilibrium (CGE) models of world trade, often presented as demonstrating the benefits of trade liberalization, now make much more modest forecasts than they did just a few years ago. The estimated benefits are not only small in the aggregate, but also skewed toward developed countries; the expected contribution of trade liberalization to economic development and poverty alleviation is extremely limited. Related calculations, for the expected benefits of services liberalization, trade facilitation measures, and long-term productivity gains from trade liberalization, remain problematical and/or speculative. The empirical limitations of CGE forecasts rest on broader theoretical weaknesses: the models are largely locked within a static framework, and remarkably assume that trade policy causes no changes in total employment, up or down. Models built on more adequate theories, which have only begun to appear, would paint a very different picture of the effects of trade liberalization.
06-06 “European Chemical Policy and the United States: The Impacts of REACH”
Get PDFThe European Union is moving toward adoption of its new Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) policy, an innovative system of chemicals regulation that will provide crucial information on the safety profile of chemicals used in industry. Chemicals produced elsewhere, such as in the United States, and exported to Europe will have to meet the same standards as chemicals produced within the European Union. What is at stake for the U.S. is substantial: we estimate that chemical exports to Europe that are subject to REACH amount to about 14 million per year. Even if, as the U.S. chemicals industry has argued, REACH is a needless mistake, it will be far more profitable to pay the modest compliance costs than to lose access to the enormous European market.
03-09 "Costs of Preventable Childhood Illness: The Price We Pay for Pollution "
Get PDFA growing body of scientific literature implicates toxic exposures in childhood illnesses and developmental disorders. When these illnesses and disabilities result from environmental factors under human control, they can and should be prevented. This report documents monetary costs associated with five major areas of health problems in children that have been linked to preventable environmental exposures: cancer, asthma, lead poisoning, neurobehavioral disorders, and birth defects. We review incidence and prevalence estimates for these disorders, as well as estimates of the associated monetary costs. We apply the concept of the “environmentally attributable fraction” (EAF) of an illness, where EAF is the estimated percentage of cases of an illness that result from an environmental exposure. Preventable childhood illnesses and disabilities attributable to environmental factors are associated with large monetary costs. Our estimate of direct and indirect costs ranges from 1.6 billion annually in Massachusetts. Of course, there is no dollar measure of the full practical and emotional burden borne by these children, their families, and the communities in which they live.
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