IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v116y2019p5262-5269.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The low but uncertain measured benefits of US water quality policy

Author

Listed:
  • David A. Keiser

    () (Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011; Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011)

  • Catherine L. Kling

    (Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853)

  • Joseph S. Shapiro

    (Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138)

Abstract

US investment to decrease pollution in rivers, lakes, and other surface waters has exceeded $1.9 trillion since 1960, and has also exceeded the cost of most other US environmental initiatives. These investments come both from the 1972 Clean Water Act and the largely voluntary efforts to control pollution from agriculture and urban runoff. This paper reviews the methods and conclusions of about 20 recent evaluations of these policies. Surprisingly, most analyses estimate that these policies’ benefits are much smaller than their costs; the benefit–cost ratio from the median study is 0.37. However, existing evidence is limited and undercounts many types of benefits. We conclude that it is unclear whether many of these regulations truly fail a benefit–cost test or whether existing evidence understates their net benefits; we also describe specific questions that when answered would help eliminate this uncertainty.

Suggested Citation

  • David A. Keiser & Catherine L. Kling & Joseph S. Shapiro, 2019. "The low but uncertain measured benefits of US water quality policy," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116(12), pages 5262-5269, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:5262-5269
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5262.full
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. McGartland, Al, 2013. "Thirty Years of Economics at the Environmental Protection Agency," Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 42(3), pages 436-452, December.
    2. Sheila M. Olmstead, 2010. "The Economics of Water Quality," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 4(1), pages 44-62, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Weng, Weizhe & Cobourn, Kelly M. & Kemanian, Armen R. & Boyle, Kevin J. & Shi, Yuning & Stachelek, Joseph & White, Charles, 2020. "Quantifying Co-Benefits of Water Quality Policies: An Integrated Assessment Model of Nitrogen Management," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304667, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

    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:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:5262-5269. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Kat Rodenhizer). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.