[PEN-L:1821] Re: Environmental Quality in Developing Countries

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not going to defend Lant Pritchett's inept and overwritten memo, or
Lawrence Summers' signing it (although I would note that
Summers-as-academic is known for giving credit to RAs and elevating them to
co-author and lead-author status much more than most of his ilk).

But there is a serious issue here. In Ghana--where 60% of the urban
population has no access to the sewer system, where 70% of energy still
comes from burning wood and charcoal (and where rain acidity as a result at
times reaches Black Forest levels), where 40% of people drink contaminated
water, and where 15% of people suffer from waterborne diseases--should
taxicabs have to have catalytic converters installed?

The "no" argument is that it adds $700 or so to the cost of the automobile.
That $700 could--if it were used wisely--be devoted to upgrading the sewer
system, or building a water purification plant, or expanding the electrical
grid so that smoke emissions from firewood could be reduced, or importing
medical supplies to treat people once they have gotten cholera. Any of
these would do more good than harm would be done by the extra CO and SO2
emitted by the taxicab over the course of its life.

The "yes" arguments--there are two--are, first, that we will never gain
control of our environmental problems until clean-up is viewed not as
merely one goal to be traded-off against others but as a fundamental
ethically-mandated constraint on all human economic activity; and, second,
that the $700 saved won't go to the sewer system or the water purification
plant or for medical supplies, but to the Swiss bank account of some Deputy
Assistant Secretary and nephew of the Colonel commanding the First Armored
Brigade somewhere in the Cayman Islands.

There is also a fourth argument: What business is it of anyone in the first
world telling people in developing countries that they can or cannot
pollute? There's a fifth argument: What developing-country government is
truly democratic, and so has the right to legislate a lower level of
pollution protection for its people in the first place? There's a sixth
argument: environmental protection is everyone's business, and the sooner
we get a global pollution control authority in place the better.

I think that all of these arguments have force.

I am inclined to say that democratically-elected governments should be
allowed to run their own pollution-control, environmental-standards, and
environmental-clean up programs: if people in the first world want to see a
greater degree of environmental clean up than democratically-elected
politicians in developing countries feel that their countries can afford,
let the first world pay for it explicitly through government-to-government
negotiations. I am also inclined to think that non-democratic governments
should be held to a much higher standard in terms of allowable emissions
from activities financed by first world (or World Bank) money--a look at
Ogoniland or Lake Baikal or the Aral Sea will convince anyone that
non-democratic governments are prone to make definitely wrong decisions
about pollution.

But these are hard and serious issues where I don't think I have many (if
any) of the answers.


Brad DeLong