"Both regulation and public disclosure belong in the environmental regulators' arsenal. Strong, clear standards combined with a significant, credible penalty system send the right signals to the regulated community, which responds by lowering pollution emissions. The public disclosure of environmental performance also provides strong additional incentives to pollution control"--Cover.

Focusing on the practical aspects of using economic incentives to achieve environmental goals, this book analyzes the design and implementation of market based programs and identifies critical issues for creating successful programs in the future. The book examines the conditions in which market incentives are most useful and probes the important new roles of both government and the private sector. It highlights the administrative, institutional, organizational, and informational requirements for successful operation of the programs, and it especially stresses the importance of program evaluation. This analysis is based on case studies of four programs at different levels of government--local, state, federal, and overseas--that use different tools--credit trading, direct taxes, variable fee structures, and refunds: the air credit trading program in the Los Angeles metropolitan area; the national pollution charge system of Russia; the recycling initiative of King County, Washington; and the deposit refund system of Michigan. Distributed for the National Academy of Public Administration

That is the central purpose of this pioneering study - namely, to assess the efficacy of alternative instruments for pollution abatement based both on theoretical explorations and real-life case studies. The authors begin by reviewing the existing policy regime and analysing its impact on the quality of air and water in India's cities and rivers respectively. They then proceed to assess the choice of instruments for pollution control by linking economic and environmental systems.

Both regulation and public disclosure belong in the environmental regulators' arsenal. Strong, clear standards combined with a significant, credible penalty system send the right signals to the regulated community, which responds by lowering pollution emissions. The public disclosure of environmental performance also provides strong additional incentives to control pollution.An increasing number of regulators have adopted public disclosure programs to create incentives for pollution control. Previous empirical analyses of monitoring and enforcement issues have focused strictly on the impact of such traditional practices as monitoring (inspections) and enforcement (fines and penalties) on polluters' environmental performance. Other analyses have separately focused on the impact of public disclosure programs. But can these programs create incentives in addition to the normal incentives of fines and penalties?Foulon, Lanoie, and Laplante study the impact of both traditional enforcement and information strategies in the context of a single program, to gain insights into the relative impact of traditional (fines and penalties) and emerging (public disclosure) enforcement strategies. Their results suggest that the public disclosure strategy adopted by the province of British Columbia, Canada, has a greater impact on both emission levels and compliance status than do orders, fines, and penalties traditionally imposed by the courts and the Ministry of the Environment.But their results also demonstrate that adopting stricter standards and higher penalties also significantly affected emission levels. Policymakers, take note: The presence of strong, clear standards together with a significant, credible penalty system sends appropriate signals to the regulated community, which responds by lowering pollution emissions.The public disclosure of environmental performance creates strong additional incentives to control pollution.This paper - a product of Infrastructure and Environment, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the determinants of environmental performance.