The authors call for a revised model for the regulation of industrial pollution. They think the traditional emphasis on appropriate instruments, while ultimately correct, is premature, because agencies in most developing countries have insufficient information and burdensome transaction costs to...

In 1989, Indonesia's Minister for Population and the Environment introduced its"Clean River"Program (PROKASIH). The program's purpose is to improve water quality by reducing pollution emmissions. Though participation is not entirely voluntary, compliance with the terms of the agreement signed by...

After weighing the costs and benefits of pollution control, profit-maximizing firms sometimes choose not to invest in pollution abatement because the penalty they expect regulators to impose for noncompliance falls short of the cost of abatement. To improve incentives for pollution control,...

Since 1989, environmental authorities of the Republic of Korea have published on a monthly basis a list of enterprises violating the country's environmental rules and regulations. This may be the longest environmental public disclosure program currently in existence. Over the period 1993-2001 in...

Only a small number of studies have empirically examined the determinants of the monitoring and enforcement performed by environmental regulators, and most of these have focused on industrial countries. In contrast, the authors empirically examine the determinants of enforcement in China. More...

Since the early 1970s, industrial countries have enacted (or amended) many environmental laws and regulations to control and improve air and water quality. Developing countries are increasingly enacting similar legislation. But imposing a ceiling on a plant's emissions does not guarantee reduced...

Economists have criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants that may face different marginal abatement costs and damage functions. Such critics ignore the difference in standard implementation across plants, giving rise to nonuniform standards. The authors...

Little empirical research has been done on monitoring and enforcement issues in environmental economics, especially to analyze the impact of monitoring and enforcement on polluters'environmental performance. No studies have been done in developing economies. The authors explore the impact of...

The accounting and public release of information about industrial toxic pollution emissions is meeting increasing criticism in that these listings typically do not account for the different toxicity risks associated with different pollutants. A firm emitting a large amount of relatively harmless...

Firms in developing countries are often said to have no incentives to invest in pollution control because they typically face weak monitoring and enforcement of environmental regulations. But the inability of formal institutions to control pollution through fines and penalties may not be as...