L59 - Regulation and Industrial Policy: OtherReturn

Environmental information disclosure instruments inevitably also carry information costs. It is important to pay attention to these costs because of the competitiveness issues connected with the regulatory burden of the private sector or the overall cost-effectiveness of different types of environmental regulation from the public sector point of view. We undertake an ex-post analysis to quantify and analyse reporting costs of private sector induced by the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR). We focus on the case of the Czech Republic. The average annual reporting costs, additional to other reporting duties, are € 365 per facility. The Czech PRTR comprises 8 times more facilities than required by the European law, and thereby increases correspondingly the total reporting costs. The best predictor variable of the costs is the need for measuring or calculating additional releases or transfers beyond the information requirements of other registers.

This article addresses the restructuration of the utilities sector/industry, a process generally described as deregulation. At the core of deregulation processes, not only in the EU, but also in the US, lies the replacement of old-fashioned forms of state regulation based on ownership control by new forms of regulation based on the operation of an independent regulatory body. In Central and Eastern European countries undergoing economic transition, surviving communist-type behavior, along with half-implemented EU deregulation directives, have led to specifically re-regulated utility markets. The new forms of regulation applied in the process of deregulation have served only to preserve the market protection of former state monopolies. Regulators who manage deregulation processes in the EU style allocate benefits across organized producer and consumer groups, so that the regulators' total utility is maximized.