Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of its environmental agency, the Ministry of the Environment (ENV) (Rock, 2002). In
Taiwan, the government bypassed its premier industrial policy agency, the Industrial
Development Board (IDB), by creating a strong environmental agency that had the legal
authority, technical capabilities and the administrative discretion to impose sanctions on
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rms that failed to meet emissions standards (Rock, 2002). By this action, the government
signalled to the IDB that it was serious about environmental clean-up. This led the IDB
to devise its own industrial environmental improvement programme - one that bench-
marked the environmental performance of
rms in particular industries
against international best practices. In this way, the government followed a pathway to
industrial environmental improvement that integrated environmental considerations into
its national innovation system. In Malaysia, a somewhat weaker environmental agency
reduced wastewater emissions in the crude palm oil (CPO) industry by establishing and
relying on close relations to CPO
Taiwanese
fi
rms, a powerful palm oil industry association, and the
Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (PORIM) (Rock, 2002).
fi
Capturing international technique effects
There is a growing body of research which suggests that process technologies in OECD
industries have lower energy, materials and pollution intensities than their counterparts
in the developing world. Both Reppellin-Hill (1999), who focused on the steel industry,
and Wheeler and Martin (1992), who analyzed the pulp and paper industry, concluded
that technique e
ects are quite substantial and that access to them by local producers is
conditioned on openness of developing economies to trade and investment. However,
questions remain as to whether these results follow automatically from openness to
OECD capital and technology or whether they depend upon the incentives that exist for
adopting such capital and technologies (Rock, 2002; Brandon and Ramankutty, 1993). If
they do not
ff
ow automatically from openness, improved environmental performance
within particular industries may well depend upon the coexistence of two conditions:
access to technologies that are less energy, materials and pollution intensive, and incen-
tives to select these technologies and adapt them to local conditions.
fl
Te chnique effects in cement and pulp and paper
What do we know about the coexistence of these two conditions in the East Asian
newly industrializing economies? While there is not much evidence on this question, two
recent studies (Angel and Rock, 2005; Rock, 2006) in notably dirty and energy-intensive
industries - cement and pulp and paper - in four East and Southeast Asian economies -
China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand - provide evidence that supports the need for
these conditions. The
ects in both
industries where access to and incentives for the adoption of environmentally friendly
technologies were present. With respect to cement production, the energy-intensity
bene
fi
ndings of these studies suggest quite large technique e
ff
ts of openness to trade, foreign investment and foreign technology range from a low
of 15% (a saving of 131 kilocalories per kilogram of clinker) to a high of 93% (658 kilo-
calories per kilogram of clinker). The impact of openness to trade, foreign investment and
foreign technology, and regulatory pressure on pollution intensity is even more dramatic
- it declines by more than 90% when plants import OECD cement kilns with OECD pol-
lution control equipment and are either part of a joint venture with an OECD multina-
tional or export. Similar
fi
fi
ndings emerge in pulp and paper plants, where liberalization of
