Abstract
There is considerable concern about the economic impacts of environmental regulations. Jonathan Fisher, former Environment Agency (EA) Economics Manager and now the Director of Jonathan Fisher Environmental Economics, reviews the available evidence on this subject. Section 2.2 presents estimates of the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. Section 2.3 reviews the available evidence on the impacts of environmental regulations on economic growth and competitiveness. Section 2.6 reviews current and recent developments of EU environmental regulations. Section 2.6.1 then examines the implications of Brexit for UK environmental regulations. Finally, Sect. 2.7 sets out some best practice principles to improve the impacts of environmental regulation on sustainable economic growth, innovation and technical change.
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- 1.
This is all Defra regulations, which are a good proxy for environmental regulations but they include farming regulations and exclude carbon schemes.
- 2.
House of Commons Treasury Select Committee (2011) found that the costs of capital of PFI schemes were also high—about 8% in real terms. There is little or no evidence of the PFI waste incinerator schemes yielding efficiency savings that could offset these high capital costs so that these PFI schemes were considered excessively expensive.
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Fisher, J. (2018). Environmental Regulation and Growth: Impact on Sustainable Economic Growth. In: Foreman, J. (eds) Developments in Environmental Regulation . Palgrave Studies in Environmental Policy and Regulation . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61937-8_2
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