Honnêteté et conformité environnementale

Integrity and Environmental Compliance by Philippe Bontems and Gilles Rotillon We here study how the existence of conscientious attitudes affects the working of compliance between an environmental agency and polluting firms, where the supervision policy may or may not include firms' self-reporting of discharges. Two main findings have been made. Firstly, non-interference may be the best policy for the agency if there is a high enough proportion of conscientious firms. Secondly, contrary to what we might expect, an exogenous increase in the number of conscientious firms does not necessarily lead to a decrease in pollution. We show that it is in fact possible that, given the number of conscientious firms, the optimum probability of inspection is low enough to entail a growth in fraud and therefore pollution. Moreover, with the system of self-reporting, which is the optimum option, an increase in the number of conscientious firms may also in some cases involve an increase in the total cost of inspection and, ultimately, welfare losses.