Environmental Regulations Under Simple Negligence or Strict Liability

Henry van Egteren () and Richard Smith

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2002, vol. 21, issue 4, 367-394

Abstract: We use negligence and strict liability as the basis for environmentalregulations and show that, when jurisdictions compete for firms that engagein environmentally risky behaviour, strict liability implements the sociallyoptimal outcome while simple negligence does not, even if the jurisdictionsfully cooperate in setting standards of care. Consequently, we argue that,even if jurisdictions delegate standard setting to a central authority, likein the European Union, this would not implement the socially optimaloutcome. We also demonstrate that harmonization of environmental regulationsmakes more sense if strict liability is used rather than simple negligence. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

Keywords: authority; liability; negligence; risky behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1015144713068 (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:21:y:2002:i:4:p:367-394

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

DOI: 10.1023/A:1015144713068

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 ().