Regulation in the Pulp and Paper : Costs and Consequences

The paper and pulp industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States. This working paper investigates the extent to which environmental and workplace regulations affect the industry and evaluate the impact of these regulations on the industry, its customers, its employees and society in general. A review of literature on this topic reveals that numerous scholars have attempted to discern the effects of specific regulations on the industry or attempted to place a dollar value on what pollution abatement costs paper manufacturers. In this paper, we will take their findings into account, identify which regulations affect the industry, and describe the total cost these regulations impose on society. We investigate the tangible and direct costs of regulation, meaning the amount that regulation actually costs companies within the industry in dollar terms, as well as the less-visible, non-monetary costs resulting from regulation. Regulation also inevitably creates unforeseen costs that neither the regulators nor participants in the market could have anticipated, and those unanticipated consequences of regulation often create the very types of problems the regulators intended to reduce or eliminate. Although the paper and pulp industry incurs a relatively high regulatory burden, firms in the industry also tend to be quite large, which gives them the advantage of being able to disperse the costs of regulation over more units. It therefore remains unclear whether regulation affects firms in this industry to a greater or lesser extent than the average firm in the United States in absolute terms, but the industry nonetheless serves as an example of the costs and consequences of government regulation