Governance by green taxes: implementing clean water policies in Europe 1970–1990

Mikael Andersen

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, 1999, vol. 2, issue 1, 39-63

Abstract: This article analyzes the use of economic instruments for environmental policy in four European countries. The study employs data from national and international sources for an ex post evaluation of the effects of economic policy instruments in the clean water programs of Denmark, France, Germany, and The Netherlands from 1970 to 1990. It is shown that among the four countries The Netherlands were the most successful in environmental terms, regarding social costs and with respect to technological innovation. On the one hand the study confirms that economic instruments can work as rather powerful stimuli for the implementation of public policies; on the other hand it provides some unexpected findings regarding the significance of the institutional context for the design and operation of market-based instruments. It is argued that institutionalized practices of public policy making influenced the specific design of the four water pollution control programs, including the design and role of economic instruments, and that the regulatory design in turn affected the degree to which the incentives provided by the economic instruments were able to influence the behavior of the polluters. The study hence points to the significance of taking into account the institutional setting of the design and operation of market-based instruments, an observation with both theoretical and practical implications. Copyright Springer Japan 1999

Keywords: Economic instruments; Environmental policy; Implementation; Water charges; Comparative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF03353902 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:envpol:v:2:y:1999:i:1:p:39-63

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... mental/journal/10018

DOI: 10.1007/BF03353902

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies is currently edited by Ken-Ichi Akao

More articles in Environmental Economics and Policy Studies from Springer, Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().