Economic Instruments for Lake Water Quality Management in Japan

抄録

This paper analyzes the introduction of transferable discharge permits for industrial phosphorus effluent control in Japan through a case study of Lake Biwa. We review the laws and the regulation system that is built on uniform, technology-based standards and show that such standards can be economically inefficient because they ignore differences in marginal abatement costs for individual polluters. It is found that there are significant variations in marginal abatement cost for industrial phosphorus removal that are not accounted for under the current type of regulation. A transferable discharge permit system that accounts for such differences is proposed and implementation problems are discussed.