Incentive or Punitive Measure? Analysis of Environmental Regulations in Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling

In order to investigate the formulation of appropriate environmental regulations in construction and demolition waste (CDW) recycling, this paper establishes a CDW recycling decision-making system consisting of a contractor, a developer, and the government and analyses the decision-making results and influencing factors of the various stakeholders. Three different types of environmental regulations have been considered in the model: (i) no regulation, (ii) incentive regulation, and (iii) punitive regulation. The research shows that the incentive regulation offers the constructor greater incentives to recycle CDW and yields higher profits for members of the system, and however, when recycling is very costly and CDW is highly damaging, punitive regulation should be implemented, as the incentive regulation leads to lower social welfare. In addition, governments should be more cautious when adopting incentive regulation, because social welfare may be negative under this condition whereas there is no such possibility under the punitive regulation.

Stick Versus Carrot: Comparing Structural Antitrust and Behavioral Regulation Outcomes

Debates on whether structural antitrust remedies or behavioral regulatory remedies should be used to implement institutional mandates are long-standing. Historical data for an entire population of firms for a fourteen-year period have been used, in a natural experiment format, to evaluate the impacts of both (a) structural antitrust policy (stick) and (b) behavioral regulation (carrot), for (i) exactly the same efficiency outcome, (ii) for the same firms, and (iii) at the same time. The results indicate that the stick has been less effective than the carrot. Implementation of regulations has had a significantly larger economic impact relative to implementing structural antitrust remedies on firm efficiency. Fiscally, annual incremental gains generated by the regulatory approach versus the antitrust approach have been over US$2 billion. Behavioral institutional design, implementation, and outcome assessments could be based on dynamic evolutionary process ideas situated within a managed incentive regulation framework. Given recent clamor for actions against technology companies, the facts suggest that behavioral regulations could constrain unacceptable firm behaviors and the results question contemporary antitrust remedies’ relative efficacy.

Effects of Value Perception, Environmental Regulation and Their Interaction on the Improvement of Herdsmen’s Grassland Ecological Policy Satisfaction

Sustainable utilization of grassland resources was an important topic concerned by worldwide countries and regions, and ecological compensation had gradually become the main policy tool for grassland environmental management and ecological protection. This study adopted face-to-face interviews and questionnaires, and multiordered Logit model was then used to explore herdsmen’s satisfaction with Grassland Ecological Conservation Subsidy and Reward Policy (GECSRP) focusing on identifying the key factors behind it. Results showed that herdsmen were not satisfied with GECSRP on the whole, while value perception, environmental regulation and their interaction played a positive role on improving the satisfaction. Specifically, economic benefits had the strongest promotion impacts, followed by social identity in the two-dimensional variables of value perception. The guiding regulation had stronger promoting impacts, followed by the incentive regulation in the two-dimensional variables of environmental regulation. Interestingly, incentive regulation played an enhanced interaction on the influence of economic benefits and environmental value on herdsmen’s satisfaction, yet the interaction between guiding regulation and environmental value was not significant. These indicated that herdsmen paid more attention to substantial subsidies and rewards in the process of ecological livestock husbandry, and environmental regulation formulated by government had a phenomenon of “relative system failure”. Thus, the grassland ecological environment policy should be further adjusted and improved to promote the economic development of pastoral areas.

On the Economics of Restructuring World Railways, with a Focus on Russia

The lecture opens with a discussion of the modern history of economists’ treatment of network industries: from cost-of-service regulation through incentive regulation to vertical restructuring. This history is then applied to the freight railways sector, followed by a discussion of the current state of the rail restructuring debate – what we term the European versus the American model, or vertical versus horizontal separation – first generally and then in the Russian Federation. Finally, we seek to derive lessons relevant to Russia from both the empirical literature and the results of recent reform policies implemented in the United States and the European Union.