Environmental Enforcement and Compliance: Lessons from Pollution, Safety, and Tax Settings

James Alm () and Jay Shimshack

Foundations and Trends(R) in Microeconomics, 2014, vol. 10, issue 4, 209-274

Abstract: Environmental monitoring and enforcement are controversial and incompletely understood. This survey reviews what we do and do not know about the overall effectiveness, as well as the cost effectiveness, of pollution monitoring and enforcement. We ask five key questions: what do environmental monitoring and enforcement actions look like in the real world? How do we assess environmental compliance and deterrence? Do environmental monitoring and enforcement actions get results? How, why, and when do inspections and sanctions achieve compliance and reduce pollution? And, what do the answers to the preceding questions tell us about designing and implementing more effective and more cost effective public policies for the environment? A key contribution is drawing lessons from diverse sources, including insights from theoretical, empirical, and experimental contributions in environmental, tax, and safety settings. We conclude that traditional environmental monitoring and enforcement actions generate important deterrence effects. However, there are limits to such deterrence, and deterrence itself cannot fully explain all patterns of environmental behavior. Encouraging compliance requires both traditional tools and additional tools.

Keywords: Environmental monitoring; Environmental enforcement; Pollution monitoring; Deterrence; Environmental behavior; Regulatory compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 K32 Q50 Q52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0700000048 (application/xml)

Related works:
Working Paper: Environmental Enforcement and Compliance: Lessons from Pollution, Safety, and Tax Settings (2014)
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:now:fntmic:0700000048

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Foundations and Trends(R) in Microeconomics from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().