Equal environmental justice for all: The enforcement of environmental regulations in minority and low-income communities.

摘要

This project evaluates whether regulatory agencies perform fewer environmental enforcement actions at facilities with large minority and low-income populations. Specifically, I examine the number of inspections, informal enforcement actions, and formal enforcement actions at major facilities permitted under the Clean Water Act to test whether there is a disparity relative to the minority and poverty rates within a three-mile radius. Although there has been significant research on general environmental justice issues such as pollution exposure and facility siting in minority and low-income communities, few researchers have focused on enforcement actions in particular. I conduct Poisson regressions on a series of models with inspection and enforcement count variables, minority and poverty rate explanatory variables, and a number of control variables. My empirical results find evidence of disparities in the number of inspections in both minority and low-income communities, and evidence of inequalities in the number of enforcement actions in minority communities.