Annex C

The concern about performance standards meeting overall environmental goals, at least without additional instruments, arises because performance standards conventionally limit only one of two variables that determine ambient environmental conditions (e.g. Sterner, 2003). To illustrate, in a linear water quality model, the ambient concentration of a pollutant in the environment (a) is a weighted sum of the polluting emissions from individual sources (ei, i = 1, 2, …, m), where the weight (..i, also known as a pollutant delivery or transport coefficient) applicable to an individual source is the proportion of its emissions that affect the ambient concentration...

Guidelines for Cost-effective Agri-environmental Policy Measures

Annex C

Standards versus taxes