As discussed below, empirical research on the means by which public disclosure spurs improved environmental performance is limited. In principle, however, it may have two types of impacts. First, it may leverage the external pressures discussed in the previous section—namely, those applied by regulators, communities, consumers, and shareholders. For example, public disclosure may inform local communities and consumers about the severity of a plant’s pollution, which in turn may cause the former to organize protests and the latter to switch to other suppliers. In terms of our heuristic model, disclosure shifts the EMP schedule up. Second, public disclosure may convey new information about pollution and abatement opportunities to plant managers and owners. In developing countries where formal regulatory pressure is limited, plant managers and owners may not have incentives to invest in collecting and analyzing such information, and public disclosure may actually facilitate that. In terms of our heuristic model, public disclosure may shift MAC down.
Two types of national public disclosure programs have emerged over the past two decades (Dasgupta et al. 2007). So-called pollutant release transfer registries simply report emissions or discharge data without using them to rate or otherwise characterize environmental performance. More than 20 countries, including Chile and Mexico, have set up such registries or are in the process of doing so.7 Like TRI, most focus on toxic pollutants not covered by conventional regulations. To my knowledge, an evaluation of a developing country’s pollutant release transfer registry has yet to appear.
The second type of national public disclosure program uses emissions data to rate plants’ environmental performance. As far as I know, these environmental performance ratings programs are confined to developing countries and focus mostly on conventional pollutants. Examples include Indonesia’s Program for Pollution Control, Evaluation, and Rating (PROPER), which was the first such program to appear and is the best known; India’s Green Rating Project (GRP); the Philippines’ EcoWatch program; China’s GreenWatch program; Vietnam’s Environmental Information Disclosure System (EIDS); and South Korea’s monthly ViolationsReport (MVR) program. These programs use a few broad performance rating categories based on plants’ compliance with environmental regulations.
Typically, the categories are flagrant violation, noncompliant, compliant, and beyond compliant. South Korea’s MVR program is an exception. Each month, it simply releases a list of firms found to be in violation of environmental regulations. As public disclosure programs have proliferated in developing countries over the past two decades, environmental economists have begun to evaluate them (Table 2). Their studies have addressed two broad questions. Do these programs cause plants to improve their environmental performance? If so, how and under what conditions? The next two subsections briefly summarize the findings from this research.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
