Oekologische Effektivitaet und oekonomische Effizienz von umweltbezogenen Selbstverpflichtungen

Peter Zerle ()

No 262, Discussion Paper Series from Universitaet Augsburg, Institute for Economics

Abstract: The following paper discusses environmental agreements as a variant of cooperative or negotiated approaches. Environmental agreements are increasingly discussed as a new policy instrument to deal with environmental problems in a flexible manner at low cost. Environmental agreements are negotiated commitments from firms or industrial associations with the government to improve their environmental performance. Agents of the industry impute environmental agreements as an instrument of environmental policy a high level of environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency. Polluting industries make use of an environmental agreement in order to prevent government intervention by other instruments. Thereby they suppose to have a greater degree of freedom to act. That is the reason why environmental agreements are discussed as an alternative to other instruments of environmental policy.The result of this paper is that environmental agreements offer no advantages in comparison to other instruments of environmental policy: The problem of free-riding and the mostly unregulated abatement effort among the firms lead to low environmental effectiveness and economic inefficiency. Combining an environmental agreement with a tradable permit system or a tax in a ‘policy mix’ can limit free-riding and inefficiency. It may lead to increasing administrative costs, lost flexibility and no time saving in implementation.

Keywords: emission standards; emission taxes; incentives to innovate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/files/71191/262.pdf (application/pdf)

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:aug:augsbe:0262

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Universitaet Augsburg, Institute for Economics Universitaetsstrasse 16, D-86159 Augsburg, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Simone Raab-Kratzmeier ().