Regulatory failure and the polluter pays principle: why regulatory impact assessment dominates the polluter pays principle

Dieter Schmidtchen, Jenny Helstroffer () and Christian Koboldt
Additional contact information
Dieter Schmidtchen: Saarland University
Jenny Helstroffer: Université de Lorraine, Université de Strasbourg, AgroParisTech, CNRS, INRAE, BETA
Christian Koboldt: DotEcon

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, 2021, vol. 23, issue 1, No 6, 109-144

Abstract: Abstract This paper shows possible inconsistencies in environmental law, in which regulatory impact assessment (RIA) and the polluter pays principle (PPP) coexist. While these norms can be compatible, we show that there are a number of realistic settings in which the PPP does not reach efficiency and systematically leads to regulatory failure. These systematic errors are due to the ex-ante restriction of possible actors, in combination with possible opportunistic behavior, market power issues, the existence of multiple optima and to the neglect of second-best problems in the PPP. We show that RIA, encompasses the polluter pays option and avoids these flaws.

Keywords: Polluter pays principle; External costs; Regulatory impact assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 H23 K2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10018-020-00285-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:envpol:v:23:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10018-020-00285-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... mental/journal/10018

DOI: 10.1007/s10018-020-00285-4

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies is currently edited by Ken-Ichi Akao

More articles in Environmental Economics and Policy Studies from Springer, Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().