Regulatory Impact Analyses of Environmental Justice Effects

Recently, the US EPA has pledged to incorporate environmental justice considerations into the fabric of its rulemaking procedures. But finding an appropriate way to incorporate environmental justice considerations into policy-making has been a procedural challenge since President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898 over 15 years ago. In particular, environmental justice concerns tend to be overshadowed by efficiency considerations as embodied in benefit-cost analysis. Yet at the same time, both Presidents Obama and Clinton have issued orders to incorporate distributional and equity considerations into benefit-cost analysis, as well as the standard efficiency considerations. This article argues that the environmental justice and benefit-cost policies and procedures in EPA\u27s rule-making can both be improved by bringing them closer together. In particular, environmental justice consideration should be incorporated into Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) by drawing on the much older tradition of incorporating distributional effects into benefit-cost analysis. By providing information on the distribution of benefits and costs of its regulatory actions, EPA would further its environmental justice objectives by providing the information that all groups—including the poor, minorities, and environmental justice communities—need to understand the impacts of a regulatory action. Crucially, this information must include costs as well as benefits. The distribution of costs--including indirect costs through higher land prices and lost jobs--are equally important as benefits, as they also affect the welfare of the poor. By incorporating such information into its RIAs, EPA would integrate environmental justice considerations into its development of regulations. Finally, by actually allowing the new information to inform the design and selection of regulations so as to better protect disadvantaged groups, adding distributional impacts to RIAs would improve the distributive justice associated with EPA\u27s actions as well as the procedural justice

A social power index for hierarchically structured populations of economic agents

Econometrics;econometrics

How Federalism Protects Future Generations from Today's Public Debts

From the politico-economic perspective, federalism is a protector of the present generation. But what about future generations? In federal states, Ricardian equivalence cannot be assumed to work properly, as migration between local jurisdictions undermines intergenerational redistribution based on parental altruism. However, we argue that there exists another equivalence mechanism which also works with purely selfish individuals: Public debts capitalize into property values. Jurisdictions with larger net debts exhibit, ceteris paribus, lower property prices. Debt capitalization in property values is the more pronounced the less elastic land supply is and the more mobile the other factors of production are. Therefore, capitalization is more relevant for local than for national debts, i.e. it is more pronounced in a federal than in a centralized state. Thus, federalism also becomes a protector of future generation

Disjointly productive players and the Shapley value

Central to this study is the concept of disjointly productive players. Two players are disjointly productive if there is no synergy effect if one of these players joins a coalition containing the other. Our first new axiom states that the payoff to a player does not change when another player, disjointly productive with that player, is removed from the game. The second new axiom means that if we merge two disjointly productive players into a new player, the payoff to a third player in a game with the merged player does not change. These two axioms, along with efficiency, characterize the Shapley value and can lead to improved run times for computing the Shapley value in games with some disjointly productive players

International Protection of Computer Programs

This Comment is designed to acquaint the international lawyer with various considerations which underlie the obtaining of copyright and patent protection for computer programs. Both patent and copyright protection are considered in view of the statutory provisions of several technologically developed countries-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. In addition, the statutory provisions of the various countries are related to the particular ideologies of the administrative agencies which implement the patent and copyright laws within each jurisdiction

Governing Fiscal Commons in the Enlarged EU

This study explores the achievements of the acceding countries in the sphere of procedural fiscal rules (labeled as fiscal governance). The primary goal is to answer two questions: what is the current state of fiscal governance in the “novice” EU comparing to the “old” EU-15? Can we prescribe the acceding states any country-specific fiscal procedures? Three major sections of the study aim at three different issues. Section 2 reviews the rationale for fiscal governance, and the main focus draws upon the common-pool problem. The next section reviews methods to find the fiscal governance suitable for countries with differing political environments. Next, observed fiscal governance is reported by means of indices from survey data gathered in May-June 2004. Group by group, the author compares the observations with what has been measured for EU-15 countries. The findings reveal the existence of groups of countries with similar characteristics and similar institutional potential.fiscal governance; fiscal rules; political fragmentation