在环境政策中的公平效率均衡证明来自规定的选择权 外文翻译.doc

本科毕业论文（设计）外 文 翻 译原文：the equity-efficiency trade-off in environmental policy: evidencefrom stated preferencesthe design of environmental policy raises several equity issues, in particular the distribution of the benefits and costs of policy, at the same time, the pursuit of equity objectives may be in conflict with the pursuit of altogether separate policy objectives. in particular, it has often been argued that there is a trade-off in environmental policy-as there appears to be in many other areas of public policy-between equity and economic efficiency, which brings these equity issues firmly to the attention of environmental economics.where such a trade-off exists, the question arises how best to address it, but there does not seem to be a straightforward answer. one apparent solution, often relied upon in economics more generally, is to abstract from equity issues to focus on attaining allocate efficiency. but this argument rests on a number of restrictive and ultimately unrealistic assumptions about redistribution. thus there may in general terms be a trade-off between equity and efficiency. more fundamentally, it is impossible to perfectly separate equity and efficiency considerations in welfare economics .just as equity cannot be ignored, notions of what is equitable, “fair” or “just” appear to be intrinsically subjective, even if they are in some way objective, it is certainly true that context matters. across different areas of public policy, a wide variety of distributive principles are applied, so that it is often difficult to identify the commonalities and put them to much practical use. this suggests it is then important to know something about public preferences over the equity-efficiency trade-off. such an approach can be supported by a number of theories in moral and political philosophy. thus, in this paper we use a simple choice experiment to elicit individual preferences over equity-efficiency trade-offs in the context of two environmental problems of different scales: (1) the mitigation of local air pollution from traffic emissions and (2) the mitigation of global climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. we gain insights into public preferences over the key policy design issues-notably the equity-efficiency trade-off-and what factors determine the differences in these from one person to the next.our central conclusion is that equity matters to people as much as efficiency does in the design and delivery of environmental policy. as much as there exist popular preferences for cost-effective policies, preferences over the distribution of costs carry similar weight. in terms of the nature and direction of these distributive preferences, two key themes emerge. the first is that the polluter ought to pay for the delivery of an environmental improvement. with respect to how property rights are allocated between the polluter and the pollute, the balance is clearly tipped toward the pollute, such that the polluter pays. the second is that income-ability to pay-should also be considered in distributing the compliance costs of pollution control policy.equity and efficiency in environment policy it is almost inevitable that policies and projects with environmental impacts will have distributional consequences, which we could very generally define as any relative change in a broad notion of income or wealth between two or more individuals. there are many dimensions to these distributive effects, including income, location in space and time, and ethnicity. in this paper, we are interested in the allocation of the opportunity cost of environmental protection. in particular, we focus on the interplay between principles guiding the allocation of cost between producers of pollution and victims of pollution, and the principle of payment in proportion to ability to pay. moreover, we are interested in the trade-off that may well exist between these distributive principles as a whole and the overall efficiency of environmental policy.the allocation of cost between producers of pollution and victims of pollution was classically constructed as a problem of liability and the initial allocation of property rights by coase (1960). the polluter pays principle (ppp) assigns property rights to the victims of pollution. it has proven to be highly influential in the drafting of environmental legislation at the national and international levels. the diametric opposite of the ppp is the beneficiary-pays principle (bpp). under this principle, the beneficiaries of an environmental improvement should pay for it. examples of the bpp can be found in international environmental agreements, although few examples can be found in national environmental policy, nevertheless, the principle that people should pay in proportion to the benefits they obtain from public-service provision is accepted and established in other areas. aside from the allocation of property rights between producers and victims of pollution, one of the foremost distributive concerns in environmental policy has been that policies could be regressive, such that low-income groups pay a disproportionate share of the opportunity cost. this may in particular be true of policies that increase the cost of household energy, and in such cases burdens might also be allocated according to ability to pay. we will generally refer to this as the ability-to-pay principle.in practice, there is much evidence to suggest that a balance is sought-that a trade-off is made-in the implementation of these principles. for example, tobey and smets (1996) argue that a barrier to implementation of the ppp in agricultural policy has been a desire to protect the incomes of family farms, who are the polluters in this case. moreover, there is also much evidence to suggest that a trade-off is made between the overall efficiency of environmental policies and the distribution of their benefits and costs. for example, while it is widely understood that the opportunity cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be minimized by choosing a policy instrument that raises revenue to offset other taxes, in practice the instrument that is chosen does not tend to raise much revenue, if any. rather, polluters are excused from paying a unit charge on all their emissions, as pollution allowances are mostly allocated for free.yet economists have tended not to concern themselves with distributive effects. a familiar argument is that distributive effects can be ignored, because redistribution is already achieved by a complete, nondistortionary system of lump-sum taxes and transfers. but this argument rests on a number of restrictive and ultimately unrealistic assumptions about redistribution. more fundamentally, it is not possible to perfectly separate equity and efficiency considerations in welfare economics. it is a basic result of the theory that an efficient allocation of resources is not unique. in order to make choices between competing allocations where it is impossible to make some individuals better off without making others worse off, it is necessary to apply potential compensation tests of the kaldor-hicks-scitovszky type. not only do the results of such tests typically depend on the initial allocation of property rights, they can readily be shown to exemplify an implicit social welfare function and an implicit utility function, together determining the marginal social welfare of a unit of consumption to different individuals. put another way, one interpretation of the standard practice in separating efficiency and equity is that it merely imposes one possible implicit weighting of the costs and benefits accruing to the individuals affected by the policy. one could be forgiven for being left uneasy by the current state of practice. even if not, pragmatism might suggest that, since distributive effects often have the capacity to command significant political attention, economics deserves to play a more constructive and active role in arbitrating the discussion.it remains for us, however, to make a case for using evidence of public preferences to inform decisions over the equity-efficiency trade-off, and for using stated-preference methods-specifically a choice experiment-to that end. taking the more general problem first, the case for using evidence of public preferences can be made either on a positive or a normative basis. the positive approach abstracts from underlying philosophical debates to simply ask how distributive problems have been resolved in reality. at the root of this approach could be the argument that notions of what is equitable, “fair” or “just” are fundamentally subjective in nature (mackie 1977). this is disputed by many philosophers who believe that ethical judgments have an objective character, but even those who make this claim tend to do so with the proviso that in practice each and every distributive problem has its own context, and that any underlying objective principles of allocation can be discovered only after these numerous contextual factors are stripped away (wiggins 2006). this, at the very least, is why empirical studies of principles of justice actually applied in different policy contexts have uncovered substantial variation.the normative case does not necessarily follow from the positive one. as hume (1739-1740) famously cautioned, prescriptive statements about what ought to be do not necessarily follow from descriptive statements about what is. nevertheless, a number of philosophical theories maintain that popularly held beliefs must be taken seriously, if the principles of justice that such theories develop are to be at once plausible and useful. “the people who are going to use them must be able to justify them to one another using only commonly accepted modes of reasoning”(miller 1999). thus some sort of reflective process is required, which exposes popularly held notions of what is just in any given context to general principles of justice, and this process should ultimately seek to reconcile them. varieties of this basic idea have been put forward by, for example, habermas (1990), hare (1971), miller (1999), and rawls (1971).we see ourselves as contributing to a wider reflective process like this, where the academic contribution includes, but is certainly not restricted to, a range of methodologies to elicit public preferences. one methodology would be to look at precedent, in the form of existing policies and social arrangements, as for instance elster (1992) does. economists would understand this to be a revealed-preference approach. another is to survey in some way public opinion, which should also be familiar ground for many environmental economists, given their ever more routine use of stated-preference techniques.in this paper, we opt for a stated preference approach. while stated-preference methods are generally used to elicit overall willingness to pay, or to accept compensation, for a change in the provision of some environmental good, we propose a different purpose. we propose to use them to lean about preferences over competing principles of equity, and over the trade-off between equity and efficiency. the choice experiment is particularly useful in this context, because of its natural ability to model trade-offs between attributes, based on lancasters (1966) characteristics theory of value. legitimate questions can be raised of whether choice experiments are suited to the task of eliciting ethical preferences over social decisions, since they are commonly used to measure the preferences of individuals (as indeed they are in this paper), to a greater or lesser extent in a setting intended to replicate consumer choice. sen (1970, 1992) highlighted the dichotomy between ethical preferences over social decisions on the one hand and ethical preferences over personal behavior on the other, whereby, roughly speaking, self-interest and agent relative ethical positions may be permissible in the latter case, but more difficult to justify in the former. this is related to concerns that individual preferences expressed as. in order to account for these concerns, we design a particularly simple choice experiment that emphasizes the principles of justice underpinning various policies on offer. such an essentially individual choice setting, nevertheless placed within wider and ongoing popular debate, has important analogues in real life (e.g., voting at the ballot box in elections). future research could take further account of these issues by administering a similar choice experiment in a group setting.little comparable research has been conducted in the environmental literature to date, although there are precedents to note. atkinson, machado, and mourato (2000) used contingent ranking to model trade-offs between competing principles to share the compliance costs of an environmental improvement policy. however they did not explore the equity-efficiency tradeoff. similarly saelen et al. (2008) use a choice experiment to estimate the curvature of a standard iso-elastic utility function for preferences over risk, inequality, and time, all in the specific context of climate-change policy (also see cameron and gerdes 2007). this could have broad significance for a class of models in welfare economics but is specific to climate change and in other respects addresses a narrower set of questions than those we pose here. finally, we should note spashs use of contingent valuation, combined with psychometric questions, to analyze how philosophical beliefs determine willingness to pay for environmental goods.source: simon dietz, giles atkinson, 2010. “the equity-efficiency trade-off in environmental policy: evidence from stated preferences”. land economics, vol. 86, no. 3, august, pp.423-443.译文：在环境政策中的公平效率均衡：证明来自规定的选择权环境政策的构思引起若干的公平问题，特别是利益和成本分配上的政策。同时，完全独立的政策目标可能引起追求公平目标的冲突。尤其是，均衡的环境政策能否适用于许多其他领域的兼顾公平与经济效率的政策是经常被争论的，由此使这些公平问题引起环境经济学的强烈关注。那些权衡问题是存在的，问题是要去解决它，但是看起来没有一个明确的答案。一个表面上的解决方法是常常根据经济学，更普遍的解决方法是，把公平问题集中于实现分配效率的抽象化上。但是这个论证存在一些限制，最后关于重新分配是一个不切实际的假设。因此，可能存在着一个关系使这个权衡兼顾公平和效率。更重要是在环境经济学中不可能完美的去兼顾公平和效率。正如公平是不容忽视的，“公平”或“合理”能否从本质上主观的去理解，即使他们是一些客观的方法，也肯定能解决这些环境问题。各种不同的分配原则是根据是不同领域的政策来应用的，所以往往很难识别它们的共同点，也很难把它们运用到实际上来。有一个很重要的建议是了解一些关于公平效率权衡的政策选择权。这种做法理论上能够带来大量的道德和政治哲学上的支持。因此，在本文中我们使用一个简单的选择试验去验证个人喜好在上下文中两个环境问题中的公平效率权衡的不同尺度：（1）减轻当地交通排放量的空气污染，（2） 通过减少温室气体排放量缓和全球气候变化。我们在关键的政策设计问题上加深了政策选择权的理解-值得注意的是公平效率权衡-与什么因素决定了个人之间理解的差异。我们的主要结论是在环境政策的设计和交付中公平问题和效率对人们一样重要。就像存在具有成本效益的政策的普遍选择权，费用分配的选择权有着相似的重要性。从这些性质与喜好的分布走向中看出，存在着两个关键问题。首先是污染者应当支付对环境改善的费用。关于污染与污染者之间如何分配产权，公正的对污染费用进行平衡，就像谁污染谁治理。其次是收入支付能力也应考虑遵从成本分配污染控制政策。环境政策中的公平与效益政策和项目对环境费用分配的影响几乎是可避免的，通常，我们可以解释为两个或更多个人之间的收入或财富相对变化。有许多因素影响这些分配，包括收入，空间和时间的位置和种族划分。在这篇论文中，我们深入研究的是环境保护的机会成本的分配。特别是，我们重点关注生产者和受害者对污染的影响以及支付能力和成本分配原则之间的相互作用。此外，我们对这些分配的原则和整体与环境政策之间的整体效率平衡进行了深入研究。科斯 (1960)对污染的生产者及污染受害者之间的责任分配问题以及产权的初始成本进行了分配。污染者自付的原则 (ppp) 分配给污染受害者的财产权利。这已经被证明在国家和国际层面上对于环境立法及起草相关法律是十分重要的。ppp 的直接反面是受益人自付 (bpp)。根据这一原则环境改善的受益人应该支付相关的费用。可以在国际环境协定中找到关于bpp 的例子，虽然可以在国家环境政策中找到这几个例子，不过，原则上人们就应所接受的利益和建立提供公共服务等方面的比例进行分配。除了对污染的生产者和受害者之间的产权分配，在环境政策中首先关注的是其中一个分配政策可能是退化的，这样低收入群体支付的机会成本不成比例。这可能特别适用于增加农村家庭能源费用政策,在这种情况下的责任的分配也可能根据支付能力去付出代价。我们通常将其称为按能力支付原则。实际上，有很多证据表明平衡是一种寻找权衡分配的原则。例如托比和施密特（1996）认为，在农业政策中实现ppp 的障碍是那些想要保护家庭收入的农场。此外，也有很多证据表明，有一个权衡在环境政策的整体效率与收益和费用的分配之间。例如，普遍的认为减少温室气体排放在一定程度上可以减少因政策的改变而引起的税收增加，从而降低机会成本。在实践中不倾向于选择增加很多的税收，即便有。相反,污染环境的单位可以免除费用支付所有他们的排放,污染津贴大多是分配免费。但经济学家往往不关心分配的影响。一个常见的论点是分配的影响可以忽略，因为重新分配已经取得的整笔款项税和转让的完整。但此论点取决于很多限制，因此停留在若干假设上，最终重新分配是不切实际的。更重要是不可能完全独立的公平和效率考虑到福利经济学。这是一个基本的理论分析的结果，一种有效的资源配置并非是独一无二的。为了选择之间很可能使一些人不做其他更好的竞争分配，有必要应用卡尔希克斯类型的潜在赔偿测试。不仅仅是这些试验结果时典型的取决于初始分配产权，他们可以轻易地显示一个潜在的例子来阐述社会福利函数和一个隐式具有实