Since the early 1970s, industrial countries have enacted (or amended) many environmental laws and regulations to control and improve air and water quality. Developing countries are increasingly enacting similar legislation. But imposing a ceiling on a plant's emissions does not guarantee reduced emissions or an improved environment. Ensuring the attainment of the regulation's objectives requires monitoring the behavior of the regulated facility and enforcing environmental standards. Most of the literature in environmental economics is theoretical and simply assumes that polluters comply with regulations. Although monitoring and enforcement problems are clearly a pitfall of environmental regulation, little empirical work has been done about the effect of current monitoring strategies on pollution emissions. The authors supply an empirical framework for measuring the impact of environmental inspections on plant emissions. They apply it to pulp and paper plants in Quebec for which reliable data were available. The results suggest that both inspection and the threat of inspections reduce pollution emissions. They also show that a plant's decision whether to report its emissions levels to the regulator is not random. Inspections improve the frequency of reporting.
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
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS 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.: