Gouldson, A, Carpenter, A and Afionis, S (2014) An international comparison of the outcomes of environmental regulation. Environmental Research Letters, 9 (7). 074019. 1 - 9. ISSN 1748-9326
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2014, IOP Publishing. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 30 Oct 2014 16:43 |
Last Modified: | 30 Oct 2014 16:43 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/9/7/074019 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | IOP Publishing |
Identification Number: | 10.1088/1748-9326/9/7/074019 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:80758 |