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Assessing Voluntary Commitments: Monitoring is Not Enough!

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  • Böhringer, Christoph
  • Frondel, Manuel

Abstract

This paper deals with a special type of voluntary approach to protect the environment, for example, that we would like to term voluntary commitment. Its major characteristic is that it represents a unilateral declaration without a decisively active role of regulators. In other words, voluntary commitments are, by definition, not the result of intensive mutual negotiations between participants and regulators. By combining theoretical considerations on the economic rationale for the popularity of voluntary commitments with an investigation of principal conceptual and statistical problems regarding their empirical assessment, it seems unlikely that voluntary commitments generally trigger significant deviations from business-as-usual. This casts doubt on the effectiveness and, hence, the efficiency of this specific type of voluntary approach. Effectiveness, guaranteed through more demanding goals, requires intensive mutual negotiations – monitoring is not enough.

Suggested Citation

  • Böhringer, Christoph & Frondel, Manuel, 2002. "Assessing Voluntary Commitments: Monitoring is Not Enough!," ZEW Discussion Papers 02-62, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:1337
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Norbert Eickhof, 2003. "Freiwillige Selbstverpflichtungen aus wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Sicht," Volkswirtschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge 61, Universität Potsdam, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät.
    2. Konnola, Totti & Unruh, Gregory C. & Carrillo-Hermosilla, Javier, 2006. "Prospective voluntary agreements for escaping techno-institutional lock-in," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 239-252, May.
    3. Eickhof Norbert, 2004. "Selbstverpflichtungen im Bereich des Umweltschutzes," ORDO. Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, De Gruyter, vol. 55(1), pages 269-286, January.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voluntary Agreements; Counterfactual; Evaluation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • Q4 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy
    • C1 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General

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