Costs of integrated environmental control

Article type: Research Article

Authors: de Boo, Abram J.

Affiliations: Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics, Department of Statistics of Manufacturing and Construction, P.O. Box 959, 2270 AZ Voorburg, Netherlands

Abstract: There are questions about the measurability of the costs of environmental control, especially in the case of integrated environmental provisions. In order to answer these questions a classification is made of possible reactions to environmental regulations, followed by an analysis of the measurability of each category. Some of the provisions turn out to be hypothetical and therefore their costs are impossible to measure. When environmental control was introduced, the unknown part of the ensuing costs was negligible. However, the unknown part will increase due to technological development induced by environmental regulations. The conclusion of this article is that surveys of the costs of environmental control can give a reliable and useful picture as long as environmental standards are relatively new or operative only in a few countries. When standards have already been established for some time or are the same in comparable countries, surveys of the costs of environmental control will lose their value.

DOI: 10.3233/SJU-1993-10103

Journal: Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 47-64, 1993