Suchergebnisse

Hamstrung by weak institutions that undermine conventional environmental regulatory tools, policymakers in developing countries are increasingly turning to voluntary approaches. To date, however, there have appeared few evaluations of these policy experiments. To help fill this gap, we summarize arguments for and against the use of voluntary regulation in developing countries, review the nascent literature on the topic, and present case studies of agreements negotiated between regulators and leather tanners in an industrial city in Mexico, a national environmental audit program in Mexico, and a national public disclosure program in India. Admittedly few in number, these three case studies nevertheless suggest that although voluntary environmental regulation in developing countries is a risky endeavor, it is by no means doomed to failure. The risks can be minimized by emphasizing the dissemination of information about pollution and pollution abatement options and by avoiding voluntary approaches in certain situations—those where regulatory and nonregulatory pressures for improved environmental performance are weak and where polluters can block quantified targets, individual sanctions for noncompliance, and other widely accepted prerequisites of effective voluntary initiatives.

Voluntary agreements with polluting industries are becoming a popular alternative to traditional environmental regulation. One reason may be that voluntary agreements can reduce compliance costs of polluting industries. In this paper we develop a family of simple policy formulation and implementation models enabling us to formally characterize the policy environments that make voluntary agreements possible. The main message of this paper is one of caution. Voluntary agreements that increase compliance costs and reduce social welfare cannot be ruled out. The analysis also suggests that giving the legislative branch of government an effective power of veto reduces (but does not eliminate) the possibility of welfare reducing voluntary agreements.

An increasingly popular instrument for solving environmental problems is the "public voluntary agreement (VA)", in which government offers modest technical assistance and positive publicity to firms that reach certain environmental goals. Prior papers treat such agreements as a superior, low-cost instrument that can be used to pre-empt a threat of traditional, inefficient, regulation. We present a more general model in which public Vas may instead be weak tools used when political opposition makes environmental taxes infeasible. We explore the conditions under which taxes, public VAs, and unilateral industry actions are to be expected, the implications for industry size, as well as the welfare implications of the various instruments.