Environmental Regulatory Analysis Paper

1538 Words4 Pages

What is the impact of environmental regulations on the US economy? The general belief is that these environmental regulations would raise production cost, reduce production output, and lead to unemployment. These effects would reduce competitiveness both domestically and abroad, as well as, increase the national deficit. In a static business environment that might be true, but we do not work and trade in a static environment and isolating one such regulatory process to determine economic success or failure is a tough challenge primarily due to the lack of controls when testing the economic effects. This paper will discuss these regulatory impacts monetarily through the analysis of the competitiveness of business in America in contrast …show more content…

The belief continues that because of these increased costs and reduced output the price of products would increase to the level that reduced competiveness and market share thus reducing profits for the American company in the competing industry. When considering environmental policy and competitiveness first consider the policy affecting the competitor. In the global world if the competition is facing the same rise in production cost as the United States company than these cost would be offsetting and only push cost on to consumers given no change in profit margin from the competing industry. Determining the policy stringency is difficult due to the complexity in which these laws are determined and the different requirements given to different industries in different places. However, looking at several different studies it is safe to say that the United States rest between twenty third and thirty three in regards to stringency far lower than many of our countries trading partners with the outlier being China. Clearly, the environmental regulation imposed by the United States government has not put us at a disadvantage, but instead the United States has less stringent regulations in comparison to their trading partners. There has been profit loss in the manufacturing industry due to environmental …show more content…

This is a topic seems to be the one preyed upon the most. Again, looking at the fact environmental regulations cause production cost increases, while product output decreases, and labor demand decrease this seems to be a viable conclusion. However, much like competitiveness, other factors play a part in employment and job loss tied directly to environmental regulation seems to be anything but true. In fact, these regulations created new jobs in, positions to regulate these regulations, equipment such as scrubbers and the like to reduce pollution and create greater efficiency in processes to offset the cost associated with the environmental regulations, as well as new fields all together or blue oceans. Let us say for instance a power plant is shut down do to environmental regulations are the people who receive their power from this plant going to go without? Unlikely, there will however, be a new source of power delivered to these people through a source that is in compliance or one of sustainable output. Therefore, if the US economy is at full employment, it is expected that any job lost due to these regulations would be equal to the number of jobs filled by jobs created through these environmental policies. How does all this affect the economy? For starters, it shows that unemployment at the macro level is not happening yes there may be labor

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