Garbage In and Garbage Out? On Waste Havens in Switzerland

Tobias Erhardt ()
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Tobias Erhardt: University of Basel

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2019, vol. 73, issue 1, No 12, 282 pages

Abstract: Abstract This study investigates whether the introduction of a unit-based garbage fee induces waste dumping in nearby communities which do not implement such a policy. To identify the existence of a “waste haven effect”, I hypothesize that the likelihood of “importing” or “exporting” waste depends on the distance to municipalities which have chosen the alternative policy option. Distances between municipalities are captured by routing data. I find some evidence for waste havens in a cross-section of Swiss municipalities. Exploiting variation in waste policy over time in a panel dataset for the canton of Ticino, I find that a decrease in distance is associated with an increase in the amount of waste collected by non-unit-pricing municipalities. The effect size is relatively small: An increase by one standard deviation in the impact factor applied to identify the waste haven effect increases the amount of collected waste per capita in non-unit-pricing municipalities by less than 3%.

Keywords: Municipal solid waste dumping; Spillovers; Waste havens (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F18 H23 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10640-018-0260-x

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