Economic Theory and Environmental Law

In Part I of this essay, I argue that environmental legislation, at least during the past twenty years, fails to make economic common sense, that is, it fails to maximize the satisfaction of consumer demand over the long run. Laws like the Endangered Species Act flout this conception of economic efficiency. This is how most Americans would have it: most Americans reject the notion that the natural environment should be made over to serve the wants of the self-interested consumer. Part II describes the way that economists have attempted to take account of citizen or community-regarding preferences. I suggest that they do this primarily by giving these convictions and beliefs shadow or surrogate prices as if they were market externalities. In Part II, I argue briefly that this shadow pricing of political, moral, and cultural convictions vitiates cost-benefit analysis. Shadow pricing allows the analyst to justify virtually any policy by assigning the appropriate prices to the opinions of the political constituency that favors it. There is, then, no popular public policy that cannot then be justified on economic grounds. In Part III of this essay, I extend my criticism of cost-benefit analysis to show that it confuses statements of principle or opinion with wants and interests of the kind that are properly revealed in and satisfied by markets. I argue that it is a mistake to treat views or convictions that merit the dignity of a hearing as if they were only wants or interests deserving of a price. I conclude that attempts to base environmental law on economic theory must fail

Consumer protection and product safety in ASEAN: a development of ASEAN general product safety directive

ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025: Forging Ahead Together was endorsed by ASEAN Leaders at the 22nd ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Blueprint provides a broad framework supported by ASEAN Economic Community Council (AECC), a body entrusted with the responsibility for the implementation and monitoring of strategic measures and sectoral work plan through periodical review of key performance index. The primary purpose this body is structured as such is to have an oversight of all sectors and to use its terms of reference to direct and ensure that the synchronisation of cross-sectoral work will not only be feasible but accelerated and delivered at a pace far greater than its predecessor. Taking into account sectors that are crucial to consumer protection and product safety under the respective working group such as ASEAN Consultative Committee on Standards and Quality (ACCSQ) and ASEAN Coordinating Committee on Consumer Protection (ACCCP), it is submitted that in order to enhance consumer protection in product safety, ACCSQ and ACCCP shall develop product safety mechanism in the form of a directive or policy to overcome unsafe products in ASEAN. The finding of the research shows that there is no directive and policy in ASEAN on product safety. Therefore, the objective this research is to identify the strategy of consumer protection in product safety, to do a comparative study with European Union regarding product safety mechanism, and to propose a product safety directive in ASEAN. This research will propose ASEAN General Product Safety Directive (AGPSD) and it is hoped that the proposed AGPSD will able to help ASEAN in monitoring unsafe products

Two Foraging Algorithms for Robot Swarms Using Only Local Communication

Large collections of robots have the potential to perform tasks collectively using distributed control algorithms. These algorithms require communication between robots to allow the robots to coordinate their behavior and act as a collective. In this paper we describe two algorithms which allow coordination between robots, but do not require physical environment marks such as pheromones. Instead, these algorithms rely on simple, local, low bandwidth, direct communication between robots. We describe the algorithms and measure their performance in worlds with and without obstacles.Engineering and Applied Science