Costs and Benefits Analysis of Vehicle Inspection Programs: A Case Study of Maryland, Study notes of Environmental Science

Download Costs and Benefits Analysis of Vehicle Inspection Programs: A Case Study of Maryland and more Study notes Environmental Science in PDF only on Docsity! ENSP102, Spring 2009 Discussion Section – March 5 & 6 • McConnell, Virginia. “Costs and Benefits of Vehicle Inspection: A Case Study of the Maryland Region,” Journal of Environmental Management, 1990. You are not required to read this article before this week’s discussion section (but you can if you want). Bring the article with you to read and discuss. This article is more technical than the others but it has lots of elements that are useful for what we are covering in this class: o This is what benefit-cost analysis looks like in practice. o Every policy consists of lots of little policies, as you now know. Thus, there are lots of policy decisions that have to be made: How often to inspect, which models to inspect, what to do about a car that fails, how many I&M stations to set up, and of course, where to set the emission standard. o The Clean Air Act requires non-attainment states to implement I&M programs. Each state gets to decide how to set up its I&M program. The proposed program must be approved by EPA. o Benefit-cost analysis might be useful in general but from a legal standpoint it is often irrelevant. See if you can figure out for this case why the BCA is being conducted. In other words, who would want to know the results of this BCA? o As with all policies, we should always ask: “Can we do better?” How to prepare: 1. Read the Abstract and Introduction 2. Read Section 3 and Table 2. 3. Read Section 4. 4. Read the first few lines of Section 5. 5. Look at questions d, e, and h below. 6. (Optional) Read the article in its entirety. (You’ll still need to skip Section 2) (cont. on back)