Public regulatory instruments  

Public authorities: Effectiveness, control and regulation (Minutes of the seminar of 20 May 2003)

Gustave Defrance and André‑Claude Lacoste

As part of its activities, the Amicale des Ingénieurs du Corps des Mines regularly forms work groups whose members, officials in the civil service or the economic sector, dwell on current or persistent problems. Since June 1988, a group has been working on public authorities’ obligations in matters of effectiveness, control and regulation. Once a month, it brings an average of twenty-five persons together to discuss this theme. The daylong seminar organized in May 2003 focused on the following questions: How to improve risk-management by the state? How to re-establish confidence between public authorities and citizens? How to build up a shared knowledge base on topics such as radioactivity or genetically modified organisms? How to communicate? What are standards? What role should experts play?

The economic instruments of environmental policy

Emmanuel Massé and Xavier Delache

Environmental resources are scarce and poorly exploited, since they are available at a price far below their real value. To offset this difference, the following regulatory or economic instruments could be used: regulations, measures related to taxation or price schedules, markets for tradable pollution permits, and ecolabeling. Their advantages and disadvantages, both economic and ecological, are analyzed in relation to the goal of sustainable development.

Summary of the report by the French Commission des Comptes et de l’Économie de l’Environnement : Agriculture and the environment

After the productivistic period following WW II, the 1990s witnessed a shift of focus to an environmental assessment of farming. As a consequence, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is being reoriented so as to take into consideration environmental exigencies. This shift still needs to take into account new data about, first of all, the effects of climatic change. New limitations but, too, new opportunities for development are emerging.