Ökonomische Analyse der EU-Richtlinie zur integrierten Vermeidung und Verminderung der Umweltverschmutzung

The main objective of the European Council Directive 96/61/EC concerning integrated pollution prevention and control is to achieve an integrated approach of environmental protection by co-ordinating the authorization procedures of the competent authorities. However, by prescribing the permit licensing process to the Member States, the Directive strengthens the command-and-control approach in environmental policy. This approach hardly gives any economic incentives to promote developments of integrating environmental concerns into the planning and creation of products and production processes. Furthermore, the Directive reveals tendencies towards uniform Community environmental quality standards and emission limit values. These tendencies towards increasing centralization at the EU level must be judged critically from the view-point of the economic Theory of Federalism. Public access to information on the environmental impact of processes ensured by this Directive, could lead to improvements of economic and ecological allocation and efficiency. Unfortunatly, the exact requirements of public information access are not specified by the Directive. Therefore, the prospective economic and ecological improvements might vanish in the legislation procedure of the Member States transposing the Directive into national law.