Message-ID: <852567DD.0075FE25.8E@WBLN0014.worldbank.org> Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 17:31:45 -0400 From: mailto:Dshaman@WORLDBANK.ORG Subject: NIPR newsletter, August 1999 To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
1- Public Information Disclosure Grows Worldwide Roots 2 - New NIPR Features: A New Targeted Search Service and Language Options 3- "Readings in the Field - A Bibliography on Natural Resources and Environmental Economics" 4- Four from the Vault - Research Papers on Pollution Havens 5 - World Bank Online Discussion on Environmental Sustainability 6- More of OnTheNet including "Soviet Pollution", and more EPA websites and conference informationDear Friend:
The NIPR team is pleased to inform you about new developments in the developing world to implement public information disclosure programs -- Mexico and India recently launched initatives to improve environmental behavior by polluting industries. NIPR has also improved its search engine and added a language option which allows visitors to translate complete pages on the site into several different languages. We have added four research papers on the subject of pollution havens, and have added an extensive bibliography on environmental economics. Finally, we have updated our ongoing features on environmental links, EPA websites and conference information. We hope you will find these new additions interesting and useful.
1 - Public Information Disclosure Grows Worldwide Roots
The public information disclosure initiatives pioneered by environmental regulators in Indonesia and the Philippines, with assistance from the NIPR team, are influencing regulators and activists in locations throughout the developing world. Witness two recent developments in Mexico and India. Procuraduria Federal de Proteccion al Ambiente (PROFEPA), Mexico's environmental enforcement agency, announced that it will begin to publish information on the environmental performance of 3,000 industries to provide incentives for them to reduce their contamination. PROFEPA will provide these industries with rankings from 0% to 100% (100% representing the top score), and will include its recommendations on how to achieve acceptable environmental performance. Among the criteria that PROFEPA uses to assess performance are an industry's handling, storage, and transport of dangerous wastes, atmospheric contamination and other high risk activities. The agency says its goal is to push industries to reach the 100% rankings within two years. PROFEPA plans to make its rankings available through its website (http://www.profepa.gob.mx) in the future. NIPR will present new materials and links as they become available.
The Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE) is a New Delhi-based NGO that has produced influential environmental reports about the state of India's environment since the early 1980s. Its most recent effort is the Green Rating Project which rates Indian companies on the basis of environmental performance. Selected to implement the project in late 1997 by the government and the U.N. Development Programme, CSE has rated 31 pulp and paper facilities across the country. The ratings, ratings methodology, project analysis and background are now online.
http://www.cseindia.org/ http://oneworld.org/cse/html/eyou/eyou32.htm
2 - New NIPR Features: A New Targeted Search Service and Language Options
NIPR has launched a new targeted search service for finding materials on industrial pollution control and regulation issues across the Internet. Most search engines, like Alta Vista or Hotbot, try to index the entire Internet -- good and bad, useful and useless, appropriate and inappropriate. NIPR's targeted search service indexes sites that have been already identified by our team as useful and appropriate for our topic. Targeted search results include a brief description from each item to help viewers identify the items they want to pursue. Finally, unlike most other Internet searches, the NIPR targeted search returns results from articles stored as PDF files -- where some of the Internet's most valuable information can be found. Please try the search and let us know what you think.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/search.htm
NIPR has also instituted a new feature -- language options. You may receive translations of complete pages on NIPR in Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese via the Alta Vista translations software conveniently located on the homepage.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/
3- "Readings in the Field - A Bibliography on Natural Resources and Environmental Economics"
Alexander Pfaff of Columbia and Robert Stavins of Harvard have put together an impressive bibliography of almost 1,000 references on natural resources and environmental economics. "Readings in the Field" is an invaluable resource for economists and environmentalists. Among the subjects included in the section on Environmental Economics are: The Theory of Pollution Control from an overview to efficiency and externalities; Numerical Measures from measuring environmental risk to measuring the benefits of improvement; to Policy with an overview of instrument choices and designs. We want to express our appreciation to Professors Stavins and Pfaff for their permission to make this document available on NIPR.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/readings/
4- Four from the Vault - Research Papers on Pollution Havens
Though not recent papers, NIPR has reached back into its archives to put online four previously unavailable research papers on pollution havens. The "pollution havens" hypothesis suggests industries in very polluting sectors will leave the highly regulated and environmentally sensitive industrialized economies for the relatively unregulated and poorer developing economies. The following papers examine or test the "hypothesis".
Muthukumara Mani and David Wheeler note that with three decades of rapid economic growth in developing countries along with rising environmental awareness in industrialized economies, many perceive a gap in "environmental pricing" between the two economies since the 1970s. According to the pollution havens hypothesis, the result should have been more rapid growth of dirty industries in unregulated economies which were open to international trade. Their cross-country analysis found a pattern of evidence which does seem consistent with the pollution havens story. But their evidence also showed that pollution haven effects have not had major significance, for a number of reasons. Among the most important is evidence that environmental regulation increases continuously with income. Any tendency toward formation of a pollution haven is self-limiting, because economic growth brings countervailing pressure to bear on polluters through increased regulation.
http://www.worldbank.org/research/peg/wps16/index.htm
Prepared as a background paper to the 1992 World Development Report, Robert E.B. Lucas, David Wheeler and Hemamala Hettige in their paper "Economic Development, Environmental Regulation, and the International Migration of Toxic Industrial Pollution, 1960-88" conducted a general test of the displacement hypothesis, developing time series estimates of manufacturing pollution intensity for a large sample of developed and developing countries between 1960 and 1988. Previous studies had asked whether environmental controls imposed in the industrialized economies were diverting investments in pollution intensive activities off-shore, but had not fully addressed other issues such as technology transfers and distribution changes. Building on this, the authors analysis yielded a number of observations such as pollution intensity had grown most rapidly in developing economies that were relatively closed to world market forces, and stricter regulation of pollution-intensive production in the OECD appears to have led to significant locational displacement with consequent acceleration of industrial pollution intensity in developing countries.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/work_paper/wps1062.htm
Gunnar Eskeland and Ann Harrison, in their paper "Moving to Greener Pastures? Multinationals and the Pollution Haven Hypothesis" used data from four developing countries (Côte d'Ivoire, Mexico, Morocco and Venezuela) to examine the pattern of foreign investment and found almost no evidence that foreign investors were concentrated in "dirty" sectors. They also examined the behavior of multinationals doing business in these four countries, testing whether there was any tendency for foreign firms to pollute more or less than their host-country counterparts. To do this, they used consumption of energy and "dirty fuels" as a proxy for pollution intensity. They found that foreign plants in these four developing countries were significantly more energy-efficient and used cleaner types of energy than their domestic counterparts. Eskeland and Harrison did an analysis of U.S. outbound investment between 1982 and 1994. They rejected the hypothesis that the pattern of U.S. foreign investment is skewed toward industries in which the cost of pollution abatement is high. The author's found almost no evidence to suggest that investors in developing countries were fleeing environmental costs at home. Instead, their evidence suggests that foreign-owned plants in four developing countries were less polluting than comparable domestic plants.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/work_paper/wps1744.htm
In "Trade Policy and Industrial Pollution in Latin America: Where are the Pollution Havens?" Wheeler and Nancy Birdsall challenge the commonly assumed notion by economists and environmentalists that greater economic "openness" lead to increased industrial pollution in developing countries. The authors argue that liberalization of trade regimes and increased foreign investment in Latin America have not been associated with pollution-intensive industrial development. From case studies and econometric evidence, Wheeler and Birdsall conclude that protected economies are more likely to favor pollution intensive industries, while openness actually encourages cleaner industry through the importation of developed country pollution standards.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/work_paper/trade/
5 - World Bank Online Discussion on Environmental Sustainability
Environmental issues became mainstreamed into the World Bank's developmental policymaking in the late 1980s, with both the design of environmental projects and the formulation of guidelines on environmental matters. But, considering the magnitude of these issues, the impact of the Bank's programs on environmental trends in the developing world has been limited and the record of its success has been mixed. From July through the first half of August, the Bank's Operations Evaluation Department sponsored an online Internet forum to allow the Bank's staff and its observers an opportunity to provide honest appraisals of the institution's work on environmental sustainability. Forum organizers hope the discussion will provide NGO's with a channel to share knowledge and anecdotes with Bank, while at the same time help activist organization gain better insight into the Bank's efforts on the environment. The forum has stopped, but will resume in November with further discussions.
http://www.worldbank.org/devforum/current-environment.html
6- More of OnTheNet including "Soviet Pollution", and more EPA websites and conference information
We have made a series of link additions that offer new and exciting stories to what's currently available on NIPR. These include new websites for several environmental ministries: Nambia, Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. We've also updated the Conference section, and for the OnTheNet page we have several interesting features. Of most note is Gerd Ludwig's photographic expose on "Soviet Pollution". Ludwig's stunning photo documentary looks at the republics of the former Soviet Union and graphically records the outcome of policies designed to maximize industrial production at the expense of the environment and public health. Also of interest will be the Greenleaf Publishing website which specializes in publications about business and environment. Greenleaf focuses on the changing views and behavioral patterns by the business community on sustainable development. The most recent edition of its magazine Greener Management International addresses the financial reasons, short and long-term, why the business community needs to build partnerships with NGO's.
http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/onthenet.htm http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/conferences/index.htm http://www.worldbank.org/nipr/epas.htm
We hope the new updates on NIPR are useful with regards to your own policy work and research efforts. As always, we welcome your comments and ideas, and we appreciate the thoughts and suggestions many of our readers have shared with us. If you know someone who would be interested in receiving the NIPR newsletter, feel free to let us know or have them contact us directly. If you wish to no longer receive our monthly mailings, please let us know by writing David Shaman at mailto:dshaman@worldbank.org. Best wishes.