 A History of Pricing Pollution (Or, Why Pigouvian Taxes are not Necessarily Pigouvian)No 27683, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: The standard history of modern environmental economics often views it as an application of A.C. Pigou's theory of externalities, refined over the decades and applied to environmental problems in the 1960s, when the first detailed pro-posals for pricing pollution were outlined by Allen Kneese, Thomas Crocker, John Dales, and others. However, the historical literature has noted problems with this narrative, including a 30-year gap in discussions of such applications and few actual citations to Pigou. This paper offers a simple explanation for this puzzle: Namely, pollution pricing is not (necessarily) Pigouvian. It argues that the early applied literature on the topic was rooted more in questions about common property resources and increasing returns from developing natural re-sources. Both topics were treated by broad literatures by the 1960s, including distinctly American traditions not particularly associated with Pigou. JEL-codes: B2 H23 Q2 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27683 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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