The World Bank's new environment strategy advocates cost-effective reduction of air and water pollutants that are most harmful to human health. In addition, it addresses threats to the livelihood of over one billion people who live on fragile lands-lands that are steeply sloped, arid, or covered...

New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

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...

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...

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...

Firms in developing countries are often said to have no incentives to invest in pollution control because they typically face weak monitoring and enforcement of environmental regulations. But the inability of formal institutions to control pollution through fines and penalties may not be as...

For almost 20 years, the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Korea has published on a monthly basis a list of enterprises that fail to comply with national environmental laws and regulations. In this paper, the authors examine the reaction of investors to the publication of these lists...

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...

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...