Assessing the Effectiveness of Voluntary Solid Waste Reduction Policies: Methodology and a Flemish Case Study

Simon De Jaeger () and Johan Eyckmans ()
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Simon De Jaeger: Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel (HUB), Belgium

No 2007/01, Working Papers from Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Faculteit Economie en Management

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of statistical techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of voluntary policy instruments for waste management. The voluntary character of these instruments implies that latent characteristics, unobserved by the analyst, might influence the participation decision and might lead to biased estimates of the effectiveness of the policy instrument if standard techniques are used. We propose an extension of the Difference-in-Differences estimator to evaluate the effectiveness of voluntary policy instruments. We illustrate the technique by estimating the effectiveness of voluntary cooperation agreements between the Flemish environmental administration and individual municipalities. We focus on agreements which aim at curbing residential solid waste. Using a dataset covering all 308 Flemish municipalities for the period 2000 - 2005, our results indicate that municipalities subscribing to the agreement reduced their waste level by less than what could be expected on the basis of their own performance prior to subscription and the performance of the non-subscribers. This result might be explained by rising marginal cost of extra residential solid waste reduction policies. In addition, there are indications that subscribing municipalities refrain from additional reduction efforts once the target waste level of the program is achieved.

Keywords: Residential solid waste; difference-in-differences; voluntary agreements; municipalities; endogeneity bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007-03
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Waste Management 28, 2008, pages 1449-1460

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2007.08.007 published version (application/pdf)
http://lirias.hubrussel.be/handle/123456789/2164 first version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Assessing the effectiveness of voluntary solid waste reduction policies: methodology and a Flemish case study (2007)
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