Standards, Taxes And Tradeable Permits

3. Discuss the relative merits of i) standards, ii) tax revenuees, and iii) tradable permits, in inducing a soci eithery optimal level of pollution. Try to provide some experiential evidence.

There is no doubt that pollution is a in effect(p) issue, a report to congress by the United States environmental Protection Agency in 2002 put together that when 19% of all streams in the US were assessed, only 51% of that water was deemed salutary, while 41% (amounting to approximately 309,755 miles of streams) was impaired.1 The problem of pollution in relation to economics is a complicated one. There atomic number 18 many factors involved in the stupefy of it, and so it is serious to try and force any one firm, or industry, or even country to try and solve the problem. There are some relatively simple economic measures a government activity can take to curb point-source pollution, where a clear cause of the problem can be found, i.e. a factory evacuant waste into rivers. However, with nonpoint pollution it is not only difficult to come across multiple sources (of unknown or ambiguous severity), it is difficult to tax or fine them, as it is unfair to seek reparations with no evidence of which party is to blame.





On top of this, governments may be unwilling to appear to harsh on firms or industries that pollute, because if they hire them to completely cover the marginal social cost of production, it may become to expensive to stay in business, and they could either see operating or leave the country for some little restrictive. Therefore a solution must be found that fairly distributes the abatement of pollution between all agents without disrupting the marketplace or punishing the firms to the extent where it is no longer expense staying in business: because of this, environmental policy is a very delicate matter.

Setting emission standards is historically the first method acting of controlling emissions in the US and Europe, but within the move decade has given way to more progressive systems It is a command-and-control approach,...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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