Oekologische Effektivitaet und oekonomische Effizienz von umweltbezogenen Selbstverpflichtungen

The following paper discusses environmental agreements as a variant of cooperative or negotiated approaches. Environmental agreements are increasingly discussed as a new policy instrument to deal with environmental problems in a flexible manner at low cost. Environmental agreements are negotiated commitments from firms or industrial associations with the government to improve their environmental performance. Agents of the industry impute environmental agreements as an instrument of environmental policy a high level of environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency. Polluting industries make use of an environmental agreement in order to prevent government intervention by other instruments. Thereby they suppose to have a greater degree of freedom to act. That is the reason why environmental agreements are discussed as an alternative to other instruments of environmental policy.The result of this paper is that environmental agreements offer no advantages in comparison to other instruments of environmental policy: The problem of free-riding and the mostly unregulated abatement effort among the firms lead to low environmental effectiveness and economic inefficiency. Combining an environmental agreement with a tradable permit system or a tax in a ‘policy mix’ can limit free-riding and inefficiency. It may lead to increasing administrative costs, lost flexibility and no time saving in implementation.