Impact of Energy and Environmental Legislation on Industry: Problems of Regulatory Cost Assessment

摘要

An examination is made of some of the problems of environmental impact assessment in the industrial sector, with particular attention to some important methodological problems frequently ignored. Some general problems of impact analysis are addressed in Section 2. This is followed in Section 3 by an overview of these major issues: the level of import substitutions, capital expenditures on pollution control, and a brief examination at how the industrial sector responded to post embargo energy price changes. Section 4 investigates marketplace responses to changes in manufacturing costs induced by regulatory requirements, from a general, theoretical microeconomics perspective. How industry responses can be estimated quantitatively for practical assessment purposes is taken up in Section 5, with a focus on the advantages and limitations of the two major modeling approaches (econometric and process models). These models allow investigations of the effects of different policies. (ERA citation 06:016893)