Tightening Environmental Standards: The Benefit-Cost or the No-Cost Paradigm?
质疑波特-范德林德关于严格环境措施能通过创新抵消成本的观点，基于经济理论和控制成本数据，认为这种抵消只是特例，环境政策仍需以收益证明成本合理。
This paper takes issue with the Porter-van der Linde claim that traditional benefit-cost analysis is a fundamental misrepresentation of the environmental problem. They contend that stringent environmental measures induce innovative efforts leading to improvements in abatement and production technologies that offset the costs of the regulations. Drawing both on basic economic theory and existing data on control costs, the authors argue that such offsets are special cases. The data indicate offsets are minuscule relative to control costs. There is no free lunch here: environmental programs must justify their costs by the benefits that improved environmental quality provides to society.