Voluntary Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries: Mexico’s Clean Industry Program

Because conventional command-and-control environmental regulation often performs poorly in developing countries, policymakers are increasingly experimenting with alternatives, including state-sponsored voluntary regulatory programs that provide incentives, but not mandates, for pollution control.

The authors use plant-level data on more than 60,000 facilities to analyze the Clean Industry Program, Mexico’s flagship voluntary regulatory initiative. Their results suggest that although the Clean Industry Program attracted dirty plants under pressure from regulators, it did not have a lasting impact on their environmental performance.

EfD Authors

Dr. Allen Blackman Research Fellow

Keywords

Propensity score matching

Centers

central america

Type of publication

EfD Discussion paper

Reference

Allen Blackman, Bidisha Lahiri, William Pizer, Marisol Rivera Planter, and Carlos Muños Piña, 2009, "Voluntary Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries Mexico’s Clean Industry Program", RFF Discussion Paper 07-36, Washington DC, September 2009.

Environment for Development

Environment for Development