Do Environmental Regulations Promote Economic Growth?
CURWOOD: With the resurgence of organic cotton, the marketplace is providing the incentive for a greener product that should help business and consumers alike, but what about mandatory rules? The current conventional wisdom says they can be a drag on the economy. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, political science professor Stephen Meyer studied the effect of environmental rules on economic growth in all 50 states. He came up with some surprising results. MEYER: When you group the states in sort of three categories, environmentally strong, moderate and weak — when you compare the strong with the weak, what you find is that on average the environmentally strong states outgrow, on all the indicators, the environmentally weak states by a factor of one and a half to two times. What’s important to understand is the Council on Competitiveness, the Reagan-Bush Administrations, all were predicting a strong negative relationship and that could not be found anywhere on the data. CUR
