Relief for the Environment? The Importance of an Increasingly Unimportant Industrial Sector

Martin Gassebner, Noel Gaston and Michael Lamla

No 06-130, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: Deindustrialisation, stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter-day features of many economies. It's common to assume that such developments pressure policy-makers to relax environmental standards. However, when heavily polluting industries become less important economically, their political importance also tends to diminish. Consequently, a regulator may increase the stringency of environmental policies. Like some other studies, we find that declining industrial employment translates into stricter environmental standards. In contrast to previous studies, but consistent with our argument, we find that greater income inequality is associated with policies that promote a cleaner environment.

Keywords: Environmental regulations; Deindustrialisation; Income inequality; Extreme bounds analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2006-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-005139293 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: RELIEF FOR THE ENVIRONMENT? THE IMPORTANCE OF AN INCREASINGLY UNIMPORTANT INDUSTRIAL SECTOR (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kof:wpskof:06-130

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().