The Political Economy of Environmental Regulation in India

Bibliographic Data

ID2844748
AuthorsDavid Stuligro, David Stuligross (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume72
Issue3
Pages392
Publication date1999-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePacific Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0030-851X • E-ISSN: 1715-3379
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2672228
OpenAlexW2325124695
LanguageEN
Citations received11

T X THE politics of environmental regulation everywhere turns on the debate over whether cleaner technologies cost jobs. In developing countries, growth is frequently seen as the major imperative facing governments that often point to industrialized countries' own polluting past as an argument against domestic environmental regulation. Over the past decade, India's annual economic growth rate has averaged around 6 percent, led by the industrial and the manufacturing sectors. Hundreds of thousands of newjobs have been created in these sectors, and the domestic marketplace now offers an array of goods that middle-class consumers would not have imagined only ten years ago. Such rapid economic gains, however, come at a cost: industrial pollution and its ramifications are features of that progress.' Workers must balance their growing incomes with often hazardous working conditions; owners must balance the cost of adhering to often stringent environmental regulations against the relatively low likelihood of being caught polluting; government administrators who oversee enforcement of regulations face two challenges: they do not have the resources required to monitor an industrial economy dominated by small firms, and their political superiors often give them contradictory directives. The inherent and explicit tensions between economic growth and quality of life issues especially when the lives whose quality is most affected tend to be predominantly among India's poor are complicated, to say the least. This article will analyze the political and economic constraints on

Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Environmental regulation · Natural resource economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact · Law · Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy · Transboundary Water Resource Management

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