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: 1824313
• 负责人: Ali Hortacsu
• 金额: $ 20.28万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 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 2023-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1824313&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年中，许多发展中国家的经济体经历了巨大的转变，但发展的主要成本是空气和水污染。污染仍然是一个核心问题的事实表明，就生产力损失和收入而言，减轻污染可能非常昂贵。相反的观点是“搬运工假设”，它假定环境政策会提高生产力。当前关于这些权衡的经验证据既有限制又模棱两可，一些研究发现污染的生产力成本很大，而其他研究则发现了支持波特假设的证据。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经验评估。研究人员还量化了这些政策的生产率和分配成本。这项研究对制造业和发电部门均研究了这些问题。 这项研究通过使用新颖的数据，创新的识别以及对前沿方法的使用为智力优点做出了重大贡献。这项研究是最早在发展中国家或发达国家中最早将企业级面板数据集结合到工业生产，环境缓解技术以及空气和水污染排放量的发电厂投资。调查人员通过关注环境放电费和减少污染规定的面板差异来开发新的认同来源，以了解发展中国家的污染。使用详细数据，研究人员还评估了污染缓解政策是否导致企业投资新的缓解技术或简单地减少其产出。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的审查标准通过评估来获得支持的。