An efficient budget allocation policy for decentralisation of responsibility for site decontamination projects

Charles Corbett, Frank Debets and Luk Wassenhove

Environmental & Resource Economics, 1996, vol. 7, issue 3, 287-305

Abstract: Selection and execution of site decontamination projects is often best left to local authorities, in accordance with the subsidiarity principle, even though the budget for such projects is made available through a central authority. In this paper we suggest a practical budget allocation policy which a central authority can employ to allocate budgets to local authorities, while still optimising the central authority's environmental objective function. The procedure is fully consistent with the principle of decentralisation of responsibility for selection and execution of projects, and requires a minimum information exchange between local and central levels. Despite the information asymmetry between local and central levels, incentive compatibility problems can be (partially) prevented by choosing an appropriate evaluation mechanism. At the same time, the procedure is computationally effective and efficient, and can guarantee a fair budget allocation, making it easy to implement and politically acceptable. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996

Keywords: Budget allocation; decentralisation; site decontamination; mathematical programming; Groves mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF00782150 (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:7:y:1996:i:3:p:287-305

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

DOI: 10.1007/BF00782150

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 ().