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Evidence of a filtered approach to environmental monitoring

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Abstract

This contribution focuses on the formulation of optimal inspection strategies and distinguishes between a targeting approach and a filtered approach to monitoring. Using a case study for the Flemish textile industry, we investigate the costs and benefits associated with specific monitoring and enforcement campaigns. The results show the beneficial role such campaigns can play in an effective and efficient monitoring policy. Thus we provide empirical evidence of the advantages associated with the filtered monitoring approach and show that filtering is an interesting complement to targeting.

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Notes

  1. For an overview of empirical studies of the enforcement of environmental policy see Cohen (2000).

  2. Belgium as a federal state consists of three regions: Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels Capital.

  3. The IPPC directive 96/91/EG of 24 September 1996 concerning Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control focuses on an integrated and preventive approach to pollution.

  4. The Seveso II directive 96/82/EG of 9 December 1996 deals with the prevention of serious accidents concerning hazardous substances as well as limiting the consequence of such accidents for public health and the environment. It was extended by directive 2003/105/EC and applies to some thousands of industrial establishments where dangerous substances are present in quantities exceeding the thresholds in the directive.

  5. Appendix 1 ‘An alphabetical list of establishments considered to be a nuisance’ to the Order of the Flemish Government of 6 February 1991 concerning environmental licenses.

  6. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is defined as the amount of oxygen needed per liter wastewater to completely break down the organic elements through oxidation (MIRA-T 2006).

  7. Yearly report AMI (2003), pp. 50–51.

  8. This was an interdisciplinary research project (2002–2004) financed by Federal Research Center with cooperation between the Center of Economic Studies of the K.U.Leuven (S. Proost, S. Rousseau & C. M. Billiet) and the Center of Environment Law of Ghent University (L. Lavrysen & C. M. Billiet).

  9. The Flemish environmental inspection agency was founded in 1991 and, in its own words, the agency was only fully functional in 1993. One of the effects of this starting-up phase is that many of the inspection reports are missing in the files and this makes the quality of the data concerning inspections before 1994 questionable.

  10. Here we exclude missing data. The percentages are calculated for the inspections for which we know the outcome.

  11. This probability is estimated using data from Rousseau (2007) and is low since in many instances more than one inspection was needed to formally document a violation. Also, many of the inspections in the dataset stated known violations in the inspection reports. Of course, these known violations will not to lead to the start of new sanctioning procedure since one was already started before.

  12. It is noteworthy that in none of the cases in our dataset an administrative sanction was imposed by the Flemish environmental inspection agency.

  13. For a recent overview of these topics see Cohen (1999) and Rousseau and Billiet (2008).

  14. The data collection ended in August 2003. Thus the comparison for 2003 has to be corrected for this since we only observe eight months for that year.

  15. For more details on these costs see Billiet et al. (2002) and Rousseau and Proost (2005).

  16. During the P216 project 38 firms received a warning letter to encourage them to correct the identified shortcomings. These warning letters contained 99 specific warnings (AMI 2003).

  17. See, for instance, Proost and Rousseau (2007) or Callan and Thomas (2000).

  18. See AMI (2003), p. 53. In Flanders, each notice of violation is send to the public prosecutor’s office and then the prosecutor decides about the next step in the sanctioning process such as dismissal, settlement or a criminal court trial. We assume that 48% of 22 notices of violation are followed by a monetary sanction: that is 23% of the cases can expect a settlement, 22% a criminal fine in first instance and 3% a fine in appeal (Billiet and Rousseau 2005). These percentages are estimated by looking at the outcome for 69 notices of violations for violations by textile firms in Flanders.

  19. Almost all (39 of 41) of the textile firms in our dataset are situated in this basin.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financed by the project ‘Economic modelling of environmental law enforcement’ funded by the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) and the SBO-project ‘Environmental Law Enforcement: a Comparison of Practice in the Criminal and the Administrative Tracks’ (www.environmental-lawforce.be) funded by the Instituut voor Wetenschap en Technology (IWT). Moreover I sincerely want to thank two anonymous referees and Carole M. Billiet for their useful suggestions.

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  1. Centre for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Sandra Rousseau

  2. HUBrussel, Stormstraat 2, 1000, Brussel, Belgium

    Sandra Rousseau

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Correspondence to Sandra Rousseau.

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Rousseau, S. Evidence of a filtered approach to environmental monitoring. Eur J Law Econ 29, 195–209 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-009-9117-7

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