An empirical study on effective pollution enforcement in Korea

Abstract

It has been recognized that extra incentives for firms' compliance with pollution regulations would be created under state-dependent enforcement as Harrington (1988) has shown theoretically. However, the extent of the overall improvement in compliance is expected to be different according to the pollution control costs and industrial structures of any given country. This paper empirically examines, for the first time, the effectiveness of an imposition of higher fines for repeated violations and state-dependent enforcement in terms of the reduction of violation days, by simulating emitting behavior for 65 sub-industries in the Korean manufacturing industry over the period 1987–1989. State-dependent enforcement was found to be more effective than an imposition of higher non-compliance fines for repeated violations in regard to the number of sub-industries exhibiting persistent non-compliance. However, the number of fully complying sub-industries was found to be slightly higher under an imposition of higher non-compliance fines for repeated violations. In Korea, it would therefore be desirable to discriminate against certain industries with enforcement systems of different intensity based on their abatement cost structures rather than uniformly introducing a state-dependent approach.