Implications for Other Industrializing Economies

In previous chapters we have demonstrated how the practice of policy integration—the linking of environmental regulatory policies with resource pricing policies, trade and investment policies, and technological capabilities building policies—in the East Asian NIEs has driven down the energy and pollution intensity of industrial activity in these economies. As we have shown, each East Asian NIE used a somewhat different strategy for driving down environmental intensities. Singapore did it by effectively linking its tough environmental agency, the Ministry of the Environment, to the country’s premier institutions of industrial policy—the Economic Development Board and the Jurong Town Corporation—charged with attracting OECD multinationals and providing them with factories and OECD-like infrastructure facilities. Taiwan Province of China took a decidedly different path. Following the decision of the central government to create a tough regulatory agency in the face of strong opposition from the country’s institutions of industrial policy, the government, by building a capable regulatory agency and allowing it to get tough with polluters, demonstrated to those who managed the institutions of industrial policy that they would have to adapt to a crackdown on polluters. They did so by using the institutions of industrial policy to craft an approach to industrial environmental improvement that linked Taiwanese firms and the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration to the technology-upgrading policies of the Industrial Development Bureau in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the technological research activities of the Industrial Technology Research Institute. Where governments had less capable environmental regulatory agencies, they used several other pathways to policy integration. The government of Malaysia followed two different pathways to policy integration. On the one hand, it adopted an industry-specific approach to de-link palm oil production and the export of processed palm oil products from palm oil pollution by integrating palm oil processors with a quasi-public, quasi-private palm oil research institute, the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia, and the Department of the Environment in a search for a cost-effective palm oil waste treatment technology. Once a viable solution to pollution emerged, the Department of the Environment used its embedded autonomy with producers in this sector to ratchet up emissions standards and de-link palm oil processing from palm oil pollution.