A Pollution Offset System for Trading Non-Point Source Water Pollution Permits

Water pollution from non-point sources is a global environmental concern. Economists propose tradable permit systems as a solution, but they are difficult to implement due to the nature of non-point sources. We present a pollution offset system for trading non-point source water pollution permits. Conventional pollution offset systems suffer from thin markets and transaction costs. In this paper, we show how to overcome these problems with a centrally managed common-pool market. We define permits as allowable nitrate loading to a groundwater aquifer. This trading system utilizes estimates of potential nitrate leaching from land uses, a set of transport coefficients generated from a simulation of nitrate transport in groundwater, an online trading system, and a linear program to clear the market. We illustrate the concept using a hypothetical case study.     

Structural Uncertainty and Pollution Control: Optimal Stringency with Unknown Pollution Sources

We relax the common assumption that regulators know the structural relationship between emissions and ambient air quality with certainty. We find that uncertainty over this relationship can manifest as a unique form of multiplicative uncertainty in the marginal damages from emissions. We show how the optimal stringency of environmental regulation depends on this structural uncertainty. We also show how new information, like the discovery of previously unknown emission sources, can counterintuitively lead to increases in both optimal emissions and ambient pollution levels.     

Irreversibility of Pollution Accumulation

This paper presents an optimal endogenous growth model with pollutionaccumulation and abatement activities which analyzes the implications ofpollution accumulation irreversibility on the existence of sustainablegrowth paths. This model studies different pollution-decay functions whichpresent, among others, the feature that a sufficiently high pollution stocklevel can reduce the rate of decay to zero. This study shows that this newfeature, which gains support for the biological literature, significantlyalters the traditional results on the properties of sustainable endogenousgrowth by reducing the field of existence and strengthening the role ofindividual preferences.     

Air Pollution and Sick-leaves

During the last decade an increasing amount of studies have investigatedthe relationship between air pollution and human health effects. In thisstudy we investigate how these effects in turn induce reduced labourproductivity in terms of sick-leaves, which is an important factor inassessment of air pollution costs in urban areas. For this purpose weemploy a logit model along with data on sick-leaves from a large office inOslo and different air pollutants. Our results indicate that sick-leaves aresignificantly associated with particulate matter (PM₁₀), while theassociations with SO₂ and NO₂, are more ambiguous. We also tryto estimate the induced social costs in terms of lost labour productivity andincreased governmental expenditures, although these estimates are moreuncertain.     

Trade Restrictiveness and Pollution

This paper proposes a trade restrictiveness indicator that explicitly incorporates environmental externalities. The index employs directional distance functions and uses indicators (i.e., differences rather than ratios) modified to account for and evaluate efficiency changes in the face of simultaneous and multidimensional trade and environmental policy reforms. The index is made up of two components, one for production and one for consumption. Our overall trade restrictiveness indicator is accordingly the difference of the two. The properties of the indicator are developed and discussed together with its estimation.     

Pollution abatement and employment

Morgenstern et al. (J Environ Econ Manag 43:412–436, 2002. doi: 10.1006/jeem.2001.1191) are well-known for its investigation of the employment effects of environmental regulations. However, the cost function specified in that paper is handicapped by its reliance on survey data of the costs of inputs assigned to pollution abatement. In this paper, we specify an input distance function that models the joint production of good and bad outputs. This allows us to measure the relative importance of factors associated with changes in employment without pollution abatement cost data. We operationalize our model using a sample of 80 coal-fired electric power plants from 1995 to 2005.     

汽车与环境污染

随着汽车工业的迅猛发展和城市化进程的加快,城市交通工具汽车尤其是家用轿车的数量急剧增加。然而由汽车造成的污染已成为城市环境及大气环境的主要污染源之一,且这种趋势仍在继续恶化。文章分析了城市污染产生的原因及对人体健康的危害,提出了防治汽车尾气污染和噪声污染的控制措施,并在技术、政策和绿化环境方面提出了减少汽车污染的思路和建议。     

Disclosure Strategies for Pollution Control

Disclosure strategies, which involve public and/or private attempts to increase the availability of information on pollution, form the basis for what some have called the third wave in pollution control policy (after legal regulation – the first wave – and market-based instruments – the second wave). While these strategies have become common in natural resource settings (forest certification and organic farming, for example), they are less familiar in a pollution control context. Yet the number of applications in that context is now growing in both OECD and developing countries. This survey will review what we know and don’t know about the use of disclosure strategies to control pollution and conclude with the author's sense of where further research would be particularly helpful.     

Controlling Pollution with Relaxed Regulations

We investigate the features of optimal environmental policies composed of pollution standards and costly inspection processes, where fines for exceeding the standards depend both on the degree of transgression and the environmental technology that the firm uses to reduce the social impact of its polluting activity. We show that the main characteristics of these policies depend crucially on when the firm selects that technology with respect to the timing of the policy announcement. In fact, the firm has incentives to over-invest in green technologies when the policy is announced afterwards; and to under-invest in them if the environmental authority plays first. Surprisingly, we find that both the firm and the regulator prefer that the firm invests in technology before the policy is announced, even when this implies that expected penalties for noncompliance might be zero.     

Transboundary Pollution and International Migration

We analyze the welfare effects of international migration in the presence of transboundary pollution. We use a simplified Copeland and Taylor (1999) model, where the (developed) home country's pollution abatement technology is superior to that of the (less developed) foreign country. If there is no trade, workers will migrate from the foreign country to the home country. The foreign country gains from migration, but whether the home country gains or not depends on the abatement‐technology gap and the magnitude of the coefficient of transboundary pollution. World welfare will increase under migration. If there is free trade in goods, international migration occurs when the home country specializes in the production of the environmentally sensitive good. In this case, migration will result in increased production of the manufactured good and increase the level of world pollution.     

The Missing Pollution Haven Effect

This paper examines the effect of recent increases inhazardous waste disposal taxes on employment growth inindustries that generate hazardous waste. Mostexisting literature has found that interjurisdictionaldifferences in environmental stringency havenegligible measurable economic consequences. Commonexplanations for this lack of effect include claimsthat (1) measures of environmental stringency arepoorly quantified, (2) compliance costs are modest,(3) variation in compliance costs among jurisdictionsis small, and (4) cross-section data are insufficientto explore the consequences of increasingly stringentstandards. This paper addresses these four concernsby quantifying hazardous waste disposal taxes,demonstrating that they are large and varied acrossjurisdictions in the United States, and showing thatthey have had a significant effect on hazardous wasteshipping among states. The paper then uses a panel ofstate and county-level data to show that despite thesefindings, state hazardous waste disposal taxes do notimpose large employment losses on industries thatgenerate waste.     

Local Pollution in Federal Systems

It is widely accepted that decentralized control of local pollution is inefficient if the central and the local authorities are imperfectly informed. This paper shows how the central authority can introduce a flexible grant-in-aid system that induces the local authority to use a weighted combination of local and central information when the local authority suffers from confirmatory bias. If the central authority is highly uncertain about the environmental effects of a specific pollutant, the tax/subsidy scheme can be designed to allow local information to play an essential role in the environmental policy. If the central authority is certain that a pollutant must not exceed a specific limit, the tax/subsidy scheme can be designed to allow local information little influence on the environmental policy.     

Decentralization in Pollution Permit Markets

A pollution permit market is decentralized when firms are allowed to trade permits across time, regions or pollutants. Using a model in which firms have better information about their abatement costs than a regulator, we develop a comparative advantage formula that delineates whether or not pollution permit markets should be decentralized. When the damage from pollution is described by a separable function, the formula implies a simple sufficient condition for not allowing decentralization.     

Chinese Industrial Pollution and Countermeasures

Chinese economy has been driven to grow at extraordinarily high levels in the past two decades. Pollution from industrial increasing presents the complexity of ＂Market Failure＂ and ＂Government Failure＂, and also the latter is more serious. The traditional public sector management appears inadequate to deal with the new challenge in environmental protection that emerges. We should reform public management behaviors and form regulations that ＂growth＂ is not the highest priority for government.     

Pollution control and the Ramsey problem

Pollution is an inevitable by-product of production and is only gradually dissolved by the environment. It can be reduced by producing less and by cleaning up the environment, but neither occur when they are left to the market. Cleaning activities and the optimal emission charges increase with the stock of pollutants. When one allows for pollution of the environment in the classical Ramsey problem, the capital stock is less than in the market outcome and a fortiori less than under the golden rule. The analysis distinguishes between stock and flow externalities arising from pollution. An increase in impatience can lead to more capital accumulation, even though this leaves less room for current consumption.     

Population Density,Pollution and Growth

We analyze a growth model where the damage of pollution depends on population density and the character of pollution. From the steady state rates of change, in the social optimum, of a neoclassical and a semi-endogenous growth model respectively, we conclude that the less responsive the damage of pollution is to population density, the more likely is a development path with positive growth in consumption per capita and declining perceived pollution per capita. Non-awareness of the character of pollution may thus give suboptimal solutions. In particular, the commonly held view that pollution is a pure public bad may lead to growth-rate targets that are lower than optimal. Finally, we find that the character of pollution does not influence the transitional dynamics qualitatively.     

Pollution control with variable production processes

This paper compares the input and output effects of pricing and regulation instruments for pollution control. It is shown that a pricing policy could have adverse output effects which should be weighed in the balance against its abatement-cost-minimisation advantage over regulation. It is also demonstrated that pricing need not lead polluters to select known processes which are less polluting than those chosen under regulation.     

产品包装废弃物的污染与回收利用

产品包装废弃物对生态环境产生严重影响：使城市的生态环境污染加剧．占用大量的耕地，使蚊蝇滋生，造成资源的大量浪费。产品包装废弃物的回收与利用可产生巨大的经济效益和社会效益，但必须解决如下几个问题：地方政府职能缺位、法律体系不健全和有法不依、国民环境意识淡薄及企业社会责任缺失。