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(In)Efficient management of interacting environmental bads

Kuosmanen, Timo and Laukkanen, Marita (2009) (In)Efficient management of interacting environmental bads. MTT Agrifood Research Finland.

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Summary

Many environmental problems involve the transformation of multiple harmful substances into one or more damage agents much in the same way as a firm transforms inputs into outputs. Yet environmental management differs from a firm's production in one important respect: while a firm seeks efficient input allocation to maximize profit, an environmental planner allocates abatement efforts to render the production of damage agents as inefficient as possible. We characterize a solution to the hmultiple pollutants problem and show that the optimal policy is often a corner solution, in which abatement is focused on a single pollutant. Corner solutions may arise even in well-behaved problems with concave production functions and convex damage and cost functions. Furthermore, even concentrating on a wrong pollutant may yield greater net benefits than setting uniform abatement targets for a harmful substances. Our general theoretical results on the management of flow and stock pollutants are complemented by two numerical examples illustrating the abatement of eutrophying nutrients and greenhouse gases.


EPrint Type:Report
Keywords:climate change, cost-benefit analysis, eutrophication, multiple pollutants, optimal environmental policy, pollution control
Subjects: Environmental aspects
Research affiliation: Finland > Luke Natural Resources Institute
Deposited By: Koistinen, Riitta
ID Code:16452
Deposited On:09 Nov 2009 11:48
Last Modified:12 Apr 2010 07:41
Document Language:English
Status:Published
Refereed:Not peer-reviewed
Additional Publishing Information:MTT Discussion Papers 5/2009

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