The accounting and public release of information about industrial toxic pollution emissions is meeting increasing criticism in that these listings typically do not account for the different toxicity risks associated with different pollutants. A firm emitting a large amount of relatively harmless...

The complaints process in China provides useful information and helps encourage community participation in environmental policy. But it also directs a big share of inspection resources to areas where people tend to complain. After analyzing provincial data for 1987-93, the authors find the...

Industry compliance with pollution regulations is far from universal, even in North America. In developing countries, compliance rates are often quite low, particularly where budgets for regulation are low or inspectors are corrupt. And strictness of enforcement varies. Regulators are reluctant...

Indoor air pollution (IAP) from cooking and heating is estimated to kill a million children annually in developing countries. To promote a better understanding of IAP, the authors investigate the determinants of IAP in Bangladesh using the latest air monitoring technology and a national...

Using factory-level data provided by China's National Environmental Protection Agency and the Tianjin Environmental Protection Bureau, the authors of this report estimate the costs of water pollution abatement for Chinese industry. Using their econometric results, they analyze the...

China's recent industrial growth, a remarkable success story, has been clouded by hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and incidents of serious respiratory illness caused by exposure to industrial air pollution. Seriously contaminated by industrial discharges, many of China's waterways are...

The authors use new data from Brazil and Mexico to analyze relationships linking economic development, the size distribution of manufacturing plants, and exposure to industrial pollution. For lack of data, prior work in this field has been limited largely to water pollution and medium-size...

Little empirical research has been done on monitoring and enforcement issues in environmental economics, especially to analyze the impact of monitoring and enforcement on polluters'environmental performance. No studies have been done in developing economies. The authors explore the impact of...

Only a small number of studies have empirically examined the determinants of the monitoring and enforcement performed by environmental regulators, and most of these have focused on industrial countries. In contrast, the authors empirically examine the determinants of enforcement in China. More...

The authors start from the premise that governments act as agents of the public in regulating pollution, using the instruments at their disposal. But when formal regulatory mechanisms are absent or ineffective, communities will seek other means of translating their preferences into reality....