For more than two decades, environmental law and regulation was dominated by command-and-control approaches — typically either mandated pollution control technologies or inflexible discharge standards on a smokestack-by-smokestack basis.  But in the 1980s, policy makers increasingly explored market-based environmental policy instruments, mechanisms that provide economic incentives for firms and individuals to carry out cost-effective pollution control.  Cap-and-trade systems, in which emission permits or allowances can be traded among potential polluters, continue today to be at the center of this action.

Most recently, this has been in the context of deliberations regarding possible U.S. actions to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions linked with global climate change, as in HR 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as in proposals developing in the Senate.  (I have written a number of blog posts on this topic.  If you’re interested, please see:  “Opportunity for a Defining Moment” (February 6, 2009); “The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade:  A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey” (May 27, 2009); “Worried About International Competitiveness?  Another Look at the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Proposal” (June 18, 2009); “National Climate Change Policy:  A Quick Look Back at Waxman-Markey and the Road Ahead” (June 29, 2009).  For a more detailed account, see my Hamilton Project paper, A U.S. Cap-and-Trade System to Address Global Climate Change.)

But the transition from command-and-control regulation to market-based policy instruments has not always been easy.  Sometimes policy can outrun basic understanding, and the claims made for the cost-effectiveness of cap-and-trade systems can exceed what can be reasonably anticipated.  Among the factors that can adversely affect the performance of such systems are transaction costs.

In general, transaction costs — those costs that arise from the exchange, not the production, of goods and services — are ubiquitous in market economies.  They can arise from any exchange: after all, parties to transactions must find one another, communicate, and exchange information.  It may be necessary to inspect and sometimes even measure goods to be transferred, draw up contracts, consult with lawyers or other experts, and transfer title.

In cap-and-trade markets, there are three potential sources of transaction costs. The first source, searching and information-collection, arises because it can take time for a potential buyer of a discharge permit to find a seller, though — for a fee — brokers can facilitate the process.  Although less obvious, a second source of transaction costs — bargaining and deciding — is potentially as important.  A firm entering into negotiations incurs real resource costs, including time and/or fees for brokerage, legal, and insurance services.  Likewise, the third source — monitoring and enforcing — can be significant, although these costs are typically borne by the responsible governmental authority and not by trading partners.

The cost savings that may be realized through cap-and-trade systems depend upon active trading.  But transaction costs are an impediment to trading, and such impediments thereby can limit savings.  So, transaction costs reduce the overall economic benefits of allowance trading, partly by absorbing resources directly and partly by suppressing exchanges that otherwise would have been mutually (indeed socially) beneficial.  But when transaction costs can be kept to a minimum, high levels of trading — and significant cost savings - are the result.

Since David Montgomery’s path-breaking work in 1972, economists have asserted that the post-trading allocation of control responsibility among sources, and hence the aggregate costs of control, are independent from the initial permit allocation.  This is an extremely important political property, but does this still hold in the presence of transaction costs?  This is a question I investigated in an article titled, “Transaction Costs and Tradable Permits,” which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 1995 (and which the publisher lists as one of the ten most cited articles in the journal’s history, going back to 1974).

The answer to this question is: “it depends.”  If incremental transaction costs are independent of the size of individual transactions, the initial allocation of permits has no effect on the post-trading allocation of control responsibility and aggregate control costs.  But if incremental transaction costs decrease with the size of individual trades, then the initial allocation will affect the post-trading outcome.

This is of great political importance, because it means that in the presence of transaction costs, the initial distribution of permits can matter not only in terms of distributional equity, but in terms of cost-effectiveness or efficiency.  This can reduce the discretion of the Congress (or other legislature or agency) to distribute allowances as they please (in order to generate a constituency of support for the program), and may thereby reduce the political attractiveness and feasibility of a cap-and-trade system.

Empirical evidence, however, indicates that transaction costs have been minimal, indeed trivial, in enacted and implemented cap-and-trade systems, including the U.S. EPA’s leaded-gasoline phasedown in the 1980s, and the well-known SO2 allowance trading system, enacted as part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.

That’s good news, surely.  But nevertheless, going forward, choices between conventional, command-and-control environmental policies and market-based instruments should reflect the imperfect world in which these instruments are applied.  Such choices are not simple, because no policy panacea exists.

On the one hand, even if transaction costs prevent significant levels of trade from occurring, aggregate costs of control will most likely be less than those of a conventional command-and-control approach.  A trading system with no trading taking place will likely be less costly than a technology standard (because the trading system provides flexibility to firms regarding their chosen means of control) and no more costly than a uniform performance standard.

But the existence of transaction costs may make the choice between conventional approaches and cap-and-trade more difficult because of the ambiguities that are introduced.  With transaction costs — as with other departures from frictionless markets — greater attention is required to the details of designing specific systems.  This is the way to lessen the risk of over-selling such policy ideas and ultimately creating systems that stand the best chance of being implemented successfully.

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Despite the potential cost-effectiveness of market-based policy instruments like pollution taxes and tradable permits, conventional approaches -- including design and uniform performance standards -- have been the mainstay of U.S. environmental policy since before the first Earth Day in 1970.

Gradually, however, the political process has become more receptive to innovative, market-based strategies. In the 1980s, tradable-permit systems were used to accomplish the phasedown of lead in gasoline (at a savings of about $250 million per year), and to facilitate the phaseout of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); in the 1990s, tradable permits were used to implement stricter air pollution controls in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, and -- most important of all -- a cap-and-trade system was adopted to reduce sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions and consequent acid rain by 50 percent under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 (saving about $1 billion per year in abatement costs).

Most recently, cap-and-trade systems have emerged as the preferred national and regional policy instrument to address carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions linked with global climate change (see my previous posts: “Opportunity for a Defining Moment” and “Green Jobs”).

Why has there been a relatively recent rise in the use of market-based approaches? For academics like me, it would be gratifying to believe that increased understanding of market-based instruments had played a large part in fostering their increased political acceptance, but how important has this really been?

In 1981, my Harvard colleague, political scientist Steven Kelman, surveyed Congressional staff members and found that support and opposition to market-based environmental policy instruments was based largely on ideological grounds: Republicans, who supported the concept of economic-incentive approaches, offered as a reason the assertion that “the free market works,” or “less government intervention” is desirable, without any real awareness or understanding of the economic arguments for market-based programs.

Likewise, Democratic opposition was based largely upon ideological factors, with little or no apparent understanding of the real advantages or disadvantages of the various instruments. What would happen if we were to replicate Kelman’s survey today? My refutable hypothesis is that we would find increased support from Republicans, greatly increased support from Democrats, but insufficient improvements in understanding to explain these changes. So what else has mattered?

First, one factor has surely been increased pollution control costs, which have led to greater demand for cost-effective instruments. By the late 1980s, even political liberals and environmentalists were beginning to question whether conventional regulations could produce further gains in environmental quality. During the previous twenty years, pollution abatement costs had continually increased, as stricter standards moved the private sector up the marginal abatement-cost curve. By 1990, U.S. pollution control costs had reached $125 billion annually, nearly a 300 percent increase in real terms from 1972 levels.

Second, a factor that became important in the late 1980s was strong and vocal support from some segments of the environmental community. By supporting tradable permits for acid rain control, the Environmental Defense Fund seized a market niche in the environmental movement and successfully distinguished itself from other groups.

Related to this, a third factor was that the SO2 allowance trading program, the leaded gasoline phasedown, and the CFC phaseout were all designed to reduce emissions, not simply to reallocate them cost-effectively among sources. Market-based instruments are most likely to be politically acceptable when proposed to achieve environmental improvements that would not otherwise be achieved.

Fourth, deliberations regarding the SO2 allowance system, the lead system, and CFC trading differed from previous attempts by economists to influence environmental policy in an important way: the separation of ends from means, that is, the separation of consideration of goals and targets from the policy instruments used to achieve those targets. By accepting -- implicitly or otherwise -- the politically identified (and potentially inefficient) goal, the ten-million ton reduction of SO2 emissions, for example, economists were able to focus successfully on the importance of adopting a cost-effective means of achieving that goal.

Fifth, acid rain was an unregulated problem until the SO2 allowance trading program of 1990; the same can be said for leaded gasoline and CFC’s. Hence, there were no existing constituencies -- in the private sector, the environmental advocacy community, or government -- for the status quo approach, because there was no status quo approach. We should be more optimistic about introducing market-based instruments for “new” problems, such as global climate change, than for existing, highly regulated problems, such as abandoned hazardous waste sites.

Sixth, by the late 1980s, there had already been a perceptible shift of the political center toward a more favorable view of using markets to solve social problems. The George H. W. Bush administration, which proposed the SO2 allowance trading program and then championed it through an initially resistant Democratic Congress, was (at least in its first two years) “moderate Republican;” phrases such as “fiscally responsible environmental protection” and “harnessing market forces to protect the environment” do have the sound of quintessential moderate Republican issues. But beyond this, support for market-oriented solutions to various social problems had been increasing across the political spectrum for the previous fifteen years, as was evidenced by deliberations on deregulation of the airline, telecommunications, trucking, railroad, and banking industries. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the concept (or at least the phrase) “market-based environmental policy” had evolved from being politically problematic to politically attractive.

Seventh and finally, the adoption of the SO2 allowance trading program for acid rain control -- like any major innovation in public policy -- can partly be attributed to a healthy dose of chance that placed specific persons in key positions, in this case at the White House, EPA, the Congress, and environmental organizations. The result was what remains the golden era in the United States for market-based environmental strategies.

If you would like to read more about the factors that have brought about the changes that have occurred in the political reception given to market-based environmental policy instruments over the past two decades, here are some references:

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