Costs of integrated environmental control

Abstract

There are questions about the measurability of the costs of environmental control, especially in the case of integrated environmental provisions. In order to answer these questions a classification is made of possible reactions to environmental regulations, followed by an analysis of the measurability of each category. Some of the provisions turn out to be hypothetical and therefore their costs are impossible to measure. When environmental control was introduced, the unknown part of the ensuing costs was negligible. However, the unknown part will increase due to technological development induced by environmental regulations.

The conclusion of this article is that surveys of the costs of environmental control can give a reliable and useful picture as long as environmental standards are relatively new or operative only in a few countries. When standards have already been established for some time or are the same in comparable countries, surveys of the costs of environmental control will lose their value.