资源预览内容
第1页 / 共10页
第2页 / 共10页
第3页 / 共10页
第4页 / 共10页
第5页 / 共10页
第6页 / 共10页
第7页 / 共10页
第8页 / 共10页
第9页 / 共10页
第10页 / 共10页
亲,该文档总共10页全部预览完了,如果喜欢就下载吧!
资源描述
本科毕业论文(设计)外 文 翻 译原文:The Equity-Efficiency Trade-off in Environmental Policy: Evidencefrom Stated PreferencesThe design of environmental policy raises several equity issues, in particular the distribution of the benefits and costs of policy, At the same time, the pursuit of equity objectives may be in conflict with the pursuit of altogether separate policy objectives. In particular, it has often been argued that there is a trade-off in environmental policy-as there appears to be in many other areas of public policy-between equity and economic efficiency, which brings these equity issues firmly to the attention of environmental economics.Where such a trade-off exists, the question arises how best to address it, but there does not seem to be a straightforward answer. One apparent solution, often relied upon in economics more generally, is to abstract from equity issues to focus on attaining allocate efficiency. But this argument rests on a number of restrictive and ultimately unrealistic assumptions about redistribution. Thus there may in general terms be a trade-off between equity and efficiency. More fundamentally, it is impossible to perfectly separate equity and efficiency considerations in welfare economics .Just as equity cannot be ignored, notions of what is equitable, “fair” or “just” appear to be intrinsically subjective, Even if they are in some way objective, it is certainly true that context matters. Across different areas of public policy, a wide variety of distributive principles are applied, so that it is often difficult to identify the commonalities and put them to much practical use. This suggests it is then important to know something about public preferences over the equity-efficiency trade-off. Such an approach can be supported by a number of theories in moral and political philosophy. Thus, in this paper we use a simple choice experiment to elicit individual preferences over equity-efficiency trade-offs in the context of two environmental problems of different scales: (1) the mitigation of local air pollution from traffic emissions and (2) the mitigation of global climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We gain insights into public preferences over the key policy design issues-notably the equity-efficiency trade-off-and what factors determine the differences in these from one person to the next.Our central conclusion is that equity matters to people as much as efficiency does in the design and delivery of environmental policy. As much as there exist popular preferences for cost-effective policies, preferences over the distribution of costs carry similar weight. In terms of the nature and direction of these distributive preferences, two key themes emerge. The first is that the polluter ought to pay for the delivery of an environmental improvement. With respect to how property rights are allocated between the polluter and the pollute, the balance is clearly tipped toward the pollute, such that the polluter pays. The second is that income-ability to pay-should also be considered in distributing the compliance costs of pollution control policy.Equity and efficiency in environment policy It is almost inevitable that policies and projects with environmental impacts will have distributional consequences, which we could very generally define as any relative change in a broad notion of income or wealth between two or more individuals. There are many dimensions to these distributive effects, including income, location in space and time, and ethnicity. In this paper, we are interested in the allocation of the opportunity cost of environmental protection. In particular, we focus on the interplay between principles guiding the allocation of cost between producers of pollution and victims of pollution, and the principle of payment in proportion to ability to pay. Moreover, we are interested in the trade-off that may well exist between these distributive principles as a whole and the overall efficiency of environmental policy.The allocation of cost between producers of pollution and victims of pollution was classically constructed as a problem of liability and the initial allocation of property rights by Coase (1960). The polluter pays principle (PPP) assigns property rights to the victims of pollution. It has proven to be highly influential in the drafting of environmental legislation at the national and international levels. The diametric opposite of the PPP is the beneficiary-pays principle (BPP). Under this principle, the beneficiaries of an environmental improvement should pay for it. Examples of the BPP can be found in international environmental agreements, although few examples can be found in national environmental policy, Nevertheless, the principle that people should pay in proportion to the benefits they obtain from public-service provision is accepted and established in other areas. Aside from the allocation of property rights between producers a
收藏 下载该资源
网站客服QQ:2055934822
金锄头文库版权所有
经营许可证:蜀ICP备13022795号 | 川公网安备 51140202000112号