An international comparison of the outcomes of environmental regulation

Gouldson, Andy, Carpenter, Angela and Afionis, Stavros 2014. An international comparison of the outcomes of environmental regulation. Environmental Research Letters 9 (7) , -. 10.1088/1748-9326/9/7/074019

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Abstract

Whilst there is much discussion about the stringency of environmental regulations and the variability of industrial environmental performance in different countries, there are very few robust evaluations that allow meaningful comparisons to be made. This is partly because data scarcity restricts the ability to make 'like for like' comparisons across countries and over time. This paper combines data on benzene emissions from Pollution Release and Transfer Registers with data on industrial production from oil refineries to generate normalized measures of industrial environmental performance across eight Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and the EU-15. We find that normalized emissions levels are improving in nearly all countries, and that there is some convergence in emissions performance between countries, but that there are still very significant variations across countries. We find that average emissions levels are lower in Japan and Germany than in the USA and Australia, which in turn are lower than in Canada and the EU-15, but we note that average emissions in the EU-15 are significantly affected by particularly high emissions in the UK. These findings have significant implications for wider debates on the stringency of environmental regulations and the variability of industrial environmental performance in different countries.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Cardiff Law & Politics
Publisher:	IOP Publishing: Open Access Journals / Institute of Physics (IoP)
ISSN:	1748-9326
Date of Acceptance:	27 June 2014
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2019 14:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/126515

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