Collaborative Research: Pollution Mitigation and Productivity in Developing Countries

合作研究：发展中国家的污染减排和生产力

• 批准号: 1824348
• 负责人: Gautam Gowrisankaran
• 金额: $ 20.28万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-09-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1824348&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Pollution; Mitigation; Productivity

The economies of many developing countries have experienced huge transformations over the past 20 years, but a major cost of development has been air and water pollution. The fact that pollution remains a central problem suggests that it may be very costly to mitigate pollution, in terms of lost productivity and revenues. An opposing view is the "Porter hypothesis" that postulates that environmental policies lead to greater productivity. The current empirical evidence on these tradeoffs is both limited and ambiguous, with some studies finding a substantial productivity cost of pollution mitigation and others finding evidence in favor of the Porter hypothesis. This research conducts a detailed empirical evaluation of whether policies in developing countries to lower pollution have been successful. The investigators also quantify the productivity and distributional costs of these policies. This research investigates these questions for both the manufacturing and power generation sectors. This research makes a significant contribution to intellectual merit, through its use of novel data, its innovative identification, and its use of frontier methods. This research is among the first to combine firm-level panel datasets on industrial production, power plant investment in environmental mitigation technologies, and air and water pollution discharges, in developing or developed countries. The investigators develop new sources of identification to understand pollution in developing countries by focusing on panel variation in environmental discharge fees and pollution reduction mandates. Using the detailed data, the investigators also evaluate whether pollution mitigation policies cause firms to invest in new mitigation technologies or simply reduce their output.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在过去的20年里，许多发展中国家的经济经历了巨大的转变，但发展的主要代价是空气和水污染。污染仍然是一个核心问题，这一事实表明，从生产率和收入的损失来看，减轻污染的成本可能非常高。一种相反的观点是“波特假说”，该假说假定环境政策会带来更高的生产率。目前关于这些权衡的经验证据既有限又模棱两可，一些研究发现缓解污染会带来巨大的生产率成本，另一些研究发现证据支持波特假说。这项研究对发展中国家降低污染的政策是否成功进行了详细的实证评估。研究人员还量化了这些保单的生产率和分配成本。这项研究调查了制造业和发电行业的这些问题。这项研究通过使用新颖的数据、创新的识别和前沿方法的使用，对智力价值做出了重大贡献。这项研究是第一批将发展中国家或发达国家的工业生产、发电厂对环境缓解技术的投资以及空气和水污染排放的公司级面板数据集结合在一起的研究之一。调查人员开发了新的识别来源，通过重点关注环境排污费和减少污染任务中的小组差异来了解发展中国家的污染。使用详细的数据，调查人员还评估了污染缓解政策是导致公司投资于新的缓解技术，还是仅仅减少了它们的产出。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。