Environmental Policy Since Earth Day I: What Do We Know About the Benefits and Costs?

Data on costs and benefits of the major environmental laws passed during the 1970s are reviewed. The winners in terms of benefit-cost analysis include: getting lead out of gasoline, controlling particulate air pollution, reducing the concentration of lead in drinking water, and the cleanup of hazardous waste sites with the lowest cost per cancer case avoided under Superfund. The losers include: mobile source air pollution control, water pollution control, and many of the regulations and cleanup decisions taken under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and Superfund.Environmental Economics and Policy,

An Economic Perspective on Environmental Regulation

The laws and regulations that govern the use of environmental resources have complicated effects on our society and our economy. Efforts to regulate environmental impacts are frequently controversial precisely because they have such complicated effects. No single perspective can adequately encompass all of the issues that arise in environmental regulation and environmental protection. Even the terms themselves suggest the fundamentally opposed philosophies that approach the assessment of environmental laws: While proponents of greater environmental activism emphasize the need to protect the environment, critics of more stringent controls emphasize that these laws regulate and limit the actions of individuals. At the PURE \u2792 conference, speakers with very different perspectives were invited to share their views of the important issues in environmental protection and environmental regulation. Myrick Freeman provides an economic perspective

Appropriate Environmental Adders

Externalities are costs imposed on third parties without compensation. Pollution is the archetypical externality. It is the pollution externality that has prompted the emerging national debate over whether public utility regulation should be modified to account for externalities. Myrick Freeman and two other authors [Raab, Townsend, this issue] discuss the arguments surrounding the externality debate. These three authors earlier presented similar material at a Legislative Institute, sponsored by the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy\u27s Project for the Study of Regulation and the Environment, for the Utilities Committee of the Maine State Legislature

Environmental Policy Since Earth Day I: What Do We Know About the Benefits and Costs?

Data on costs and benefits of the major environmental laws passed during the 1970s are reviewed. The winners in terms of benefit-cost analysis include: getting lead out of gasoline, controlling particulate air pollution, reducing the concentration of lead in drinking water, and the cleanup of hazardous waste sites with the lowest cost per cancer case avoided under Superfund. The losers include: mobile source air pollution control, water pollution control, and many of the regulations and cleanup decisions taken under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and Superfund

The Sign and Size of Option Value

We adapt the theoretical state-preference model to value nonmarket public goods under individual uncertainty about use, illustrating with an assessment of willingness-to-pay to prevent acid rain lake damage in the northeast United States. Individual ...