The Siting of Hazardous Waste Facilities in Federal Systems: The Political Economy of NIMBY

Per Fredriksson

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2000, vol. 15, issue 1, 75-87

Abstract: This paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardous waste treatment facilitiesin federal system. We first show that a decentralized systemyields the first-best waste treatment capacity level and that acentralized structure gives rise to free-riding behavior amonglocal jurisdictions. In our model, each community seeks toinfluence the central government through political contributions.This leads to suboptimal levels of treatment capacity. Thecapacity is increasing in the compensation level if the marginalbenefit of treatment capacity is sufficiently large, and in thegovernment's weight on aggregate social welfare relative tolobbying activities. The centralized system can replicate thedecentralized system with a sufficiently high compensation level.Since compensation has proved difficult, a centralized systemfaces greater obstacles than a decentralized system. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: federalism; free-riding; institutional design; lobbying; noxious facilities; pollution tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1008313612369 (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:kap:enreec:v:15:y:2000:i:1:p:75-87

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1008313612369

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().