John Kroencke: Markets and the Environment
The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is pleased to announce the publication of:
Markets and the Environment:
Free Market Solutions to Environmental Problems?
John Kroencke
(PDF)
Web-friendly and divided into sections (clickable endnotes):
About Markets and the Environment
Is large-scale government intervention the only way to address environmental problems, such as climate change, over-fishing and particulate pollution? Markets and the Environment argues that markets are just as likely to be the solution. Assuming a simplistic dichotomy between markets and environmental protection can lead to the naïve conclusion that problems are ‘market failures’ of a kind which government intervention will be able to seamlessly correct by restraining market forces.
Instead, real-world comparative analysis is needed, which weighs the performance of alternative institutional and governance arrangements. The report explains and adopts the fundamental concepts of economics to examine both environmental problems themselves and policy approaches to addressing them. It develops a rigorous argument which draws on Coasean insights about transaction costs and the reciprocal nature of externalities.
After building up from the principles, it demonstrates how market-based solutions can achieve environmental goals more efficiently than traditional command-and-control regulations. That is, it is the solution to environmental problems often lies in introducing, not restraining, market forces. In some cases, government policy stands in the way of property rights and markets emerging, but in the toughest cases market-based regulation informed by economics offers a way forward and has had successes where implemented.
ISBN: 9781910666296
About the Author
Dr John Kroencke is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. He joined the Centre in 2021 after completing his PhD in Economics at George Mason University. He spent the 2020–21 academic year as a final-year Fellow at the Centre for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. In 2023 he authored Private Planning and the Great Estates which explored the capacity of large landowners to capture spillover effects and engage in long-term planning by looking at the large urban estates of aristocratic and institutional landlords in inner London. John’s research focuses on the history of economics and on the intersection of markets and policy.