IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/envpol/v6y2004i1d10.1007_bf03353928.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Centralized versus local environmental standard setting: firm, capital, and labor mobility in an interjurisdictional model of firm-specific emission permitting

Author

Listed:
  • Mitch Kunce

    (University of Wyoming)

Abstract

An important public policy question that remains unresolved is whether environmental standards are best set centrally or locally. At the center of the debate is whether devolution can induce jurisdictions of a federation to “race to the bottom” in pursuit of industry and jobs. A widely cited and received exception to this line of reasoning was forwarded by Oates and Schwab in 1988. Their results suggested that immobile homogeneous residents of a jurisdiction trade higher aggregate emissions (localized) for increased wage income in a socially efficient manner. The fixity of the number of firms in each jurisdiction, however, is implicitly assumed and appears to be the linchpin to their equilibrium. This article reexamines potential distortions in decentralized decisionmaking by extending the Oates and Schwab general equilibrium construct to include labor mobility, explicit firm mobility, and firm-specific emission permitting. Whenever firms, labor, and capital are mobile across jurisdictions, decentralized environmental standards can be set too high, too low, or socially efficient depending on jurisdictional production relationships and firms’ responsiveness to key policy variables. This outcome implies that the decentralized efficiency result might not be as prominent as previously argued and appears as a single case in a more general model of decentralized government behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Mitch Kunce, 2004. "Centralized versus local environmental standard setting: firm, capital, and labor mobility in an interjurisdictional model of firm-specific emission permitting," Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Springer;Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS, vol. 6(1), pages 1-9, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:envpol:v:6:y:2004:i:1:d:10.1007_bf03353928
    DOI: 10.1007/BF03353928
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF03353928
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/BF03353928?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Wilson John Douglas, 1995. "Mobile Labor, Multiple Tax Instruments, and Tax Competition," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 333-356, November.
    2. Kunce, Mitch, 2000. "A Nash tax game extending the generality of the Henry George Theorem," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 229-233, February.
    3. Adam B. Jaffe et al., 1995. "Environmental Regulation and the Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturing: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 33(1), pages 132-163, March.
    4. Wellisch Dietmar, 1995. "Locational Choices of Firms and Decentralized Environmental Policy with Various Instruments," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 290-310, May.
    5. Oates, Wallace E. & Schwab, Robert M., 1988. "Economic competition among jurisdictions: efficiency enhancing or distortion inducing?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 333-354, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mitch Kunce, 2004. "Centralized versus local environmental standard setting: firm, capital, and labor mobility in an interjurisdictional model of firm-specific emission permitting," Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Springer;Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS, vol. 6(1), pages 1-9, March.
    2. Kunce, Mitch & Shogren, Jason F., 2005. "On interjurisdictional competition and environmental federalism," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 212-224, July.
    3. Pedro Naso Author name: Tim Swanson, 2017. "How Does Environmental Regulation Shape Economic Development? A Tax Competition Model of China," CIES Research Paper series 54-2017, Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute.
    4. Kunce, Mitch & Shogren, Jason F., 2008. "Efficient decentralized fiscal and environmental policy: A dual purpose Henry George tax," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 569-573, April.
    5. Mitch Kunce, 2023. "Decentralized Pollution Standard Setting with Agglomeration Forces Present in a Model of Specific Firm Mobility," Business & Entrepreneurship Journal, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 12(1), pages 1-3.
    6. Kunce, Mitch & Shogren, Jason F., 2007. "Destructive interjurisdictional competition: Firm, capital and labor mobility in a model of direct emission control," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(3), pages 543-549, January.
    7. Bommer, Rolf, 1995. "Environmental policy and industrial competitiveness: The pollution haven hypothesis reconsidered," Discussion Papers, Series II 262, University of Konstanz, Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 178 "Internationalization of the Economy".
    8. Hikaru Ogawa, 2010. "Fiscal Competition among Regional Governments - Tax Competition, Expenditure Competition and Externalities -," Public Policy Review, Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-30, February.
    9. Sturm, Daniel & Ulph, Alistair, 2002. "Environment, trade, political economy and imperfect information: a survey," Discussion Paper Series In Economics And Econometrics 0204, Economics Division, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.
    10. Glazer, Amihai, 1999. "Local regulation may be excessively stringent," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(5), pages 553-558, September.
    11. Lee, Kangoh, 2002. "Factor Mobility and Income Redistribution in a Federation," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 77-100, January.
    12. Dijkstra, Bouwe R., 2003. "Direct regulation of a mobile polluting firm," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 265-277, March.
    13. Levinson, Arik, 2003. "Environmental Regulatory Competition: A Status Report and Some New Evidence," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 56(1), pages 91-106, March.
    14. Williams, Roberton C., 2012. "Growing state–federal conflicts in environmental policy: The role of market-based regulation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(11), pages 1092-1099.
    15. Lai, Yu-Bong, 2019. "Environmental policy competition and heterogeneous capital endowments," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 107-119.
    16. Wallace E. Oates & Wallace E. Oates, 2004. "A Reconsideration of Environmental Federalism," Chapters, in: Environmental Policy and Fiscal Federalism, chapter 7, pages 125-156, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    17. Ghosal, Vivek & Stephan, Andreas & Weiss, Jan, 2014. "Decentralized Regulation, Environmental Efficiency and Productivity," Ratio Working Papers 229, The Ratio Institute.
    18. Cees Withagen & Alex Halsema, 2013. "Tax competition leading to strict environmental policy," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 20(3), pages 434-449, June.
    19. Johan F.M. Swinnen & Thijs Vandemoortele, 2008. "The Political Economy of Nutrition and Health Standards in Food Markets," Review of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 30(3), pages 460-468.
    20. van 't Veld, Klaas & Shogren, Jason F., 2012. "Environmental federalism and environmental liability," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 105-119.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:envpol:v:6:y:2004:i:1:d:10.1007_bf03353928. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.