William J. Vaughan

The choice of pollution control policy instruments in developing countries: arguments, evidence and suggestions

I. Background Concern about the environmental costs of economic development is now both widespread and intense. At one extreme, environmental deterioration, as through air and water pollution and deforestation, is seen as an unavoidable cost of industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of consumption (and the change in its composition) that are at the heart of “development” in the common use of the word. At the other, strongly influenced by the notion of “sustainability” that has been developed since the Bruntland Report (World Commission on Environment & Development, 1987), is the view that the environmental degradation being accepted by developing countries may well be enough to prevent them from continuing on a development path. Deterioration of natural resources and the health costs of pollution, may together overwhelm such growth momentum as has been generated by local and global policies and events. Somewhere in the middle of this polyphonic chorus of projection and advice lies the work on “environmental Kuznets curves”, cross-section phenomena that seem to promise the possibility; at least, that growth and environmental quality may be reconcilable in the long run (e.g.; Stern, 1998).

The national recreational fishing benefits of water pollution control

Results are presented of an effort to estimate the fresh water recreational fishing benefit derived from water pollution control efforts. Methodology is potentially applicable to other subcategories. (PSB)

Monitoring Point Sources of Pollution: Answers and More Questions from Statistical Quality Control

Abstract Discharges of pollutants to the environment are best regarded as stochastic, not deterministic. Thus the monitoring of point sources of discharge to determine whether a violation of a discharge standard has occurred can be viewed as a statistical quality control problem. This paper reviews the mechanics of designing an optimal statistical quality control scheme, and evaluates the applicability of such schemes in the environmental monitoring context. Complicating problems particular to environmental monitoring, such as the correct definition of a discharge standard, the measurement of the net benefits of discharge reduction, and the possibility of gaming behavior by the discharger inhibit the practical applicability of optimal statistical quality control programs as a solution to the monitoring problem.

Obtaining Welfare Bounds in Discrete-Response Valuation Studies: Comment

In a recent article published in Land Economics, Boman, Bostedt, and Kristrim (1999, hereafter BBK) show how nonparametric lower bound, intermediate and upper bound measures of average welfare change can be extracted from discrete-response contingent valuation survey data, building on the work of Kristrim (1990) and Haab and McConnell (1997). The article appears to offer a promising route to getting estimates of mean willingness to pay (WTP) along with their respective variances without having to estimate parametric choice models, thereby providing a computationally simple way to capture both the methodological uncertainty about the choice of a central tendency measure and the statistical uncertainty associated with any particular measure. Having an accurate estimate of the variance of mean WTP allows one to make confidence interval statements about mean WTP. When measures of mean WTP and its variance are extracted

A linear programming model of residuals management for integrated iron and steel production

Abstract This paper briefly describes a linear programming model designed to allow the exploration of questions surrounding the management of the environmental impacts of integrated iron and steel facilities. In particular, the model can show how plant discharges will change in the absence of specific legal restrictions or effluent charges, with such variables as product mix, steel-furnace type, casting technology, and the scrap-ore price ratio. In addition, the costs implied by placing restrictions on discharges of specific residuals (e.g., BOD, oil, suspended solids, particulates) may be estimated, or response to proposed effluent charges may be predicted.

The implications of model complexity for environmental management

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to consider the implicatons of model complexity for the quality of the information provided by models of production activities that account for the processes involved in residuals generation and treatment. Using each of the three primary technologies for iron and steel-making industry and models of varying detail for each, the paper compares the estimated levels of residuals generated and treatment costs for both atmospheric and waterborne effluents. The findings suggest that there are strategic details in model construction which have fundamental implications for the design of environmental policies. Moreover, preliminary estimates of the costs of model construction and operation suggest that policymakers may not be able to afford complexity for its own sake. Rather these costs will require the development of methods to isolate the strategic details in each technology that are potentially important to environmental policies.

Uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis based on referendum contingent valuation

Using contingent valuation methods (CVM) is increasingly common in project analysis. Referendum-type questions are thought to be easier to answer than the open-ended variety, but there is a downside: econometric techniques must be applied to the referendum data to infer the mean or median willingness to pay (WTP) of the sample and, thus, of the population of potential beneficiaries. This is not just a technical point as is demonstrated with data from a referendum CV study of a sewage and wastewater treatment project in Brazil. A factor of 4 separates lowest from highest central tendency estimates, ignoring the outlier that is 14 times larger than the largest of the other figures. This is ample variation to make a difference in the cost-benefit analysis. Analysts using referendum CV must be sensitive to the problems they buy into, and must decide how to deal with the uncertainty in the results.

Strategic details and process analysis model for environmental management: An econometric analysis☆

Abstract This paper develops a methodology for isolating the important features of large scale, process analysis models for production activities. These models were designed to estimate the economic costs of environmental regulations. Econometric estimates of neoclassical cost functions based on repeated solutions to nine such models were used to discriminate each process models inherent features. The findings include sensitivity analyses of the effects of the specification of the cost functions and of the experimental design used to derive the solutions.