Trump Needs a Reality Check: Environmental Protections Save Lives, Create Jobs, Strengthen the Economy

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Date

April 9, 2017

News Type

Media Highlight

Source

Salon

"Economist Richard Morgenstern, a former EPA deputy administrator now at the nonprofit think tank Resources for the Future, corroborated those findings. His landmark 2002 paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management analyzed the effect of environmental policies on four heavily polluting industries between 1979 and 1991 and found an overall “small but significantly positive” net employment impact of environmental standards on plastics manufacturers and oil refiners. Revisiting the issue in 2013, Morgenstern and economist Anna Belova examined more than 30 years of data for 10 industries and found no significant job losses due to regulation. On the contrary, the data showed that pollution control expenditures in many cases produced more jobs than anticipated."

Topics

Benefit-Cost Analysis

Related People

Richard D. Morgenstern

Senior Fellow

Richard Morgenstern is a senior fellow at RFF. His research focuses on the economic analysis of environmental issues with an emphasis on the costs, benefits, evaluation, and design of environmental policies.

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