It has often been asserted that imposition of environmental regulations in the 1970's may be a partial explanation for the productivity growth slowdowns experienced by most industrialized countries during that decade.The contention is that expenses incurred to satisfy these regulations, such as investment in pollution abatement capital, is unproductive in terms of measured output. Thus conventional productivity measures will be biased downward when such regulations are imposed. In this paper we construct a model which explicitly recognizes the difference between pollution abatement capital and "productive" capital and then use this framework to devleop an adjustment to nonparametric measures of productivity growth, purging them of the bias resulting from regulation. We measure the bias for the manufacturing sectors of three countries, the U.S., Canada and Germany, and thereby assess the impact of increased pollution abatement capital regulation on productivity growth. Our principal finding is that the bias, which depends on relative rates of growth of output and pollution abatement capital investment, is modest.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
1763.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 1985 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1763
Note: PR Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)