ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS This research paper dis

For economic and political reasons, government must play a major role in controlling pollution. The issue is not whether but how government should intervene in the economy to control pollution in order to optimize the efficient allocation of resources to enhance the public good and to ensure that the burdens of pollution control are distributed as fairly as possible. By the 1960s, a general consensus developed in the industrialized countries that decisions made in the private marketplace were resulting in environmental damage on a scale which was unacceptable. In conventional economic analysis, Ruff says that "the efficiency of competitive markets depends on the identity of private costs and social costs" but that in the case of pollution, "private and social costs diverge, and private profit-maximizing decisions are not socially efficient" (23-24).

The simplest form of government control of pollution-causing activities in the economy is direct or 'command and co

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e if someone is willing to pay for it, and each individual is held to be best judge of how a policy affects him or her" and that "the overall value to society of a proposed policy change is measured by the sum of individual interests" (422-423). However, it is extraordinarily difficult to place a dollar value on such intangibles as "the reduced well-being that results from aesthetic degradation," such as are involved in the destruction of magnificent scenery or, as in the case of TAP, the partial loss of the "last really vast authentic wilderness in the United States" (Krutilla and Fisher 236). About all that can safely be said is that a "quantitative analysis can be very useful even in the absence of its capacity to capture all of the values potentially attributable to preserving rare natural environments" (Krutilla and Fisher 135). The costs of pollution abatement, "the expenditures that private firms, governments, and individuals must make to comply with regulations" are quantifiable but are subject to many technical and other uncertainties (Krupnick and Portney 423). Even less susceptible to quantification is "the amount of money required to compensate individuals for the unfavorable effects associated with a regulatory or p
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Cicchetti Sepetys, Krutilla Fisher, Hard Choices, Spence Weitzman, ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS, Krupnick Portney, Public Policies, Middle East, Pedro Bay, Wrong Route, natural resource, cicchetti charles, pollution control, benefits costs, los angeles, wrong route, natural resource damage, angeles times, resource damage, norton 1993, nancy dorfman, 3rd ed york, los angeles times, wrong route environment, ww norton 1993,
Approximate Word count = 3756
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)