Social Benefits Of Environmental Regulation

Introduction

Laws and regulations play an increasingly important part in the decision-making process of particular environmental issues and the development of relevant and impactful polices. In addition, economics is also very important in order to provide society and law makers with the appropriate strategies and instruments to reach sustainable environmental development goals. Boyer and Laffont (1999) put forth the argument that one advantage of the law creation process is that policy makers, using their knowledge of macroeconomics, could craft the more suitable environmental regulation. Law and economics may therefore contribute towards a better grasp of environmental law, for example by outlining an understanding of why environmental law

But, these effects seem to be relatively minor and and owe their initial affects to the transition period. In the longer term, the environment regulation effects tend to be less than in the short term. It is suggested that pro-active government policies can help minimize the transition impact of environmental laws on competitiveness, such as labor markets policies. These small effects seem more often to occur within states where relocation barriers are low, than across borders. Globally, the estimated effects of environmental regulations on trade and investment location so far are not a factor in comparison to other considerations, like market conditions and the level of local skilled workforce. Interestingly, the social benefits of environmental laws, especially in terms of enhanced health, increasingly seem to hugely outweigh their costs. The recent studies point that there is no need to reduce environmental regulations for competitiveness, trade, investment or social

The most hardcore regulations are in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, while the most laid back are in Greece and Ireland. The UK and USA are close to the OECD average. Internationally, policies everywhere have become more stringent since 1990. More relevant is that a new OECD study by researchers confirms earlier discoveries about the impact of individual policies, being “an increase in stringency of environmental policies does not harm productivity growth.” This finding is in stark contrast what most governments and industries seem to believe: that green laws may be justified by the necessity to save the planet, but impose immediate negative economic costs. On the contrary, idealistic green goals have shown to been pragmatic by benefitting the planet, society and the economy, and this quash initial fears about their