Francesco Nicolli

Are You Sure You Want to Waste Policy Chances? Waste Generation, Landfill Diversion and Environmental Policy Effectiveness in the EU15

We empirically test delinking of waste dynamics with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of environmental and specific waste-related policies, by exploiting a newly constructed, integrated waste-economic-policy dataset based on official data for the EU15 for 1995-2007. We find that absolute delinking for waste generation is far from being achieved in the EU despite fairly stringent and longstanding policy commitment that goes back to the mid 1990s, but which however is biased towards waste management and waste disposal rather than waste prevention. Policy as well as country structural factors seem to impact instead on landfill diversion. Nevertheless, country heterogeneity matters: SURE based analyses show that EU average figures often hide high variance. Their results provide food for thought for a future most comprehensive EU waste policy strategy, which is now aimed mainly at landfill diversion, within a framework strongly oriented to allowing countries to decide about the implementation of EU directives.

Embedding landfill diversion in economic, geographical and policy settings

We analyse the process of landfill diversion embedding the dynamics in a frame where economic, geographical and policy variables enter the arena. We aim at investigating in depth what main drivers may be responsible for such a phenomenon. We exploit a rich panel dataset covering all the 103 Italian provinces. The case study on Italy is worth being considered provided that Italy is a main country in the EU, thus offering important pieces of information on the evaluation of policies. Evidence shows that the observed decoupling between economic growth and landfilling is driven by a mix of structural factors, as population density and waste management strategies. If on the one hand, the landfill tax is not arising as a significant driver of the phenomenon, other waste management instruments are associated with high significant negative effect on landfilled waste. In association to the features of the tariff system, we also underline the key role played by the share of separated collection in driving down landfilling of waste. Both the evolution of collection and tariff system are joint factors that may drive a wedge between the comparative waste performances of northern and southern regions.

A Survey of the Literature on Environmental Innovation Based on Main Path Analysis

This paper reviews the literature on environmental innovation (EI) and systematizes it by means of an original methodology identifying the main directions in which the literature on EI has developed over time. In order to do so, two algorithms are adopted and used to analyze a citation network of journal articles and books. The main path analysis reveals that this literature revolves around the following topics: i) determinants of EI; ii) economic effects of EI; iii) environmental effects of EI; and iv) policy inducement in EI. Each of these topics is discussed and implications from the main findings as well as possible future research extensions are outlined.

Waste dynamics in economic and policy transitions: decoupling, convergence and spatial effects

Taking an economic-geographical perspective, through a panel analysis of Italian municipal solid waste (MSW) data, we show that although decoupling for waste generation from income is absent, there are some signs of absolute decoupling for landfilled waste. Within this general picture, geographical and socio-economic differentiation across Italian provinces seems to matter. Spatial effects at the level of provinces – the institutions that primarily manage waste regulations – seem to be negligible, especially for landfilled waste. This is consistent with the fact that the definition and implementation of landfill policy effectively happened at sub-provincial (even municipal) levels; as a result, the recent waste policy decentralisation process has been characterised by fragmented actions. In light of this fragmentation, we note that although North-South waste performances show some signs of convergence, greater co-ordination aimed at complete convergence in waste performance, in a decentralised policy scenario, will be needed for the effective achievement of EU national based targets by a federal country.

Waste Dynamics, Country Heterogeneity and European Environmental Policy Effectiveness

We empirically test the decoupling of waste dynamics with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of environmental and specific waste-related policies, by exploiting an integrated data set for the EU15 over 1995–2007. We find that absolute delinking for waste generation is far from being achieved in the European Union (EU) despite the fairly stringent and longstanding policy commitment, which was and is still probably too biased towards waste management and waste disposal targets, rather than towards waste prevention per se. On the other hand, policy action as well as country structural factors seems to have an impact on landfill diversion. Country heterogeneity fairly matters: the seemingly unrelated regression analyses that we adopt, including models that tackle policy endogeneity, show that EU average figures often hide high variance in decoupling performances. EU countries can be consistently grouped according to their waste sustainability performances. The results provide food for thought for setting comprehensive EU waste policy strategies jointly aimed at waste reduction and landfill diversion. This is a relevant outcome and food for thought within an EU framework that is strongly oriented towards allowing countries to decide about the implementation of EU Directives.

The Evolution of Renewable Energy Policy in OECD Countries: Aggregate Indicators and Determinants

This paper proposes different methods to aggregate heterogeneous policies for renewable energy. We compare time-varying indicators built using principal component analysis with average-based indicators. The main goal of the paper is to account for the evolution of both types of policy indicators with a set of common variables. Our empirical results are consistent with predictions of politicaleconomy models of environmental policies as lobbying, income and, to a less extent, inequality have expected effects on policy. The brown lobbying power, proxied by entry barriers in the energy sector, has negative influence on the policy indicators even when taking into account endogeneity in its effect. The results are also robust to dynamic panel specifications and to the exclusion of groups of countries. Interestingly, too, corruption has only an indirect effect on policy mediated by entry barriers, while the negative effect of inequality is much stronger for the richer countries.

Environmental Policies, Product Market Regulation and Innovation in Renewable Energy

We investigate the effectiveness of policies in favor of innovation in renewable energy under different levels of competition. Using information regarding renewable energy policies, product market regulation and high-quality green patents for OECD countries since the late 1970s, we develop a pre-sample mean count-data econometric specification that also accounts for the endogeneity of policies. We find that renewable energy policies are significantly more effective in fostering green innovation in countries with deregulated energy markets. We also find that public support for renewable energy is crucial only in the generation of high-quality green patents, whereas competition enhances the generation of green patents irrespective of their quality.

Waste Sustainability, Environmental Management and Mafia: Analysing Geographical and Economic Dimensions

Waste management / disposal performances and a desirable delinking between income and waste trends are influenced by socio economic, institutional and policy factors. In highly regionalised settings many idiosyncratic factors of local interest influence waste management and disposal. Through an impact on policy enforcement costs, crime activities in a defined area and their geographical spillovers, may negatively affect legal forms of waste management and disposal. Given its high regional heterogeneity and known plague of Mafia in areas affected by recent =waste crisis‘, Italy is a compelling case study: in full consistence to a theoretical model that analyzes how legal disposal (landfill), illegal disposal and recyclable waste levels are influenced by waste tariff and crime; econometric analysis on Italian provinces, shows that separated collection and legal forms of waste disposal are lower when crime spills are present. Crime activities erode and slow down the enhancement of waste management and disposal brought about by socio economic and structural factors enhanced by the introduction of newly crafted economic minded tariffs.

Analysing the interactions of energy and climate policies in a broad policy ‘optimality’ framework: the Italian case study

The paper investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of energy-environmental policy interactions in Italy, adopting a broad optimality perspective that includes policy feasibility and dynamic efficiency. The analysis highlights that though some complementarity among different policies exists, climate policies have been often undermined by energy and renewables policy. Nevertheless, some complementarities among policy landscapes are found, as in the case of the Kyoto Fund (climate policy) and of the incentives and funding towards thermal energy, both acting as a complementary tool to cover non-EU-ETS sectors. Overall, renewables oriented policies bring about efficacy, but this often occurs at the expenses of their efficiency, thus generating a trade-off between these two components of optimality. Finally, incentives for renewables and energy efficiency investments give a mixed signal to improve innovation and to stimulate the green sector. In conclusion, notwithstanding efficacy is present in some cases, cost effectiveness and efficiency are far from being achieved.

Waste dynamics, decoupling and ex post policy effectiveness: evidence from the EU 15

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of municipal and packaging waste generation dynamics, based on panel data for the EU15. The evidence provides some valuable policy implications since it analyses the extent to which decoupling has occurred for the two waste streams and if and how effectively EU waste policy has influenced the waste generation-income relationship since 1995. We demonstrate that although absolute decoupling is far from being generally achieved for both municipal and even packaging waste generation – both historically heavily regulated by EU directives – there are some first positive signs of stronger relative decoupling with respect to the past. Nevertheless, the impact of waste policies is negligible, probably due to the biased focus on waste disposal and recovery rather than waste reduction at source. Waste prevention should definitely become the core objective of future waste regulation efforts in the EU, even assigning targets in terms of waste generated per capita.