Ex-post evaluation of clean production agreements in the Chilean industrial sectors

Abstract

Voluntary agreements (VAs) have become an attractive instrument to encourage clean production in the world, since they can be adapted to each industrial sector and country in which they are implemented. In Chile, VAs are known as Clean Production Agreements/Acuerdos de Producción Limpia (APLs). In this context, the present study aims to perform an ex - post evaluation of the APLs that have been signed and implemented in different industrial sectors of Chile to establish if there is a causal relationship between this program and the reduction in consumption of water, electricity, fuels and CO2 emissions. For the above, a pseudo-panel technique is used with data from firms that are grouped into cohorts by industrial sector according to the ISIC code, which are obtained from the different versions of the Annual National Industrial Survey between 2001 and 2014. The results show that the APLs have only contributed to significantly reduce the consumption of fuel oil (46.8%) and liquefied petroleum gas (15.7%), which coincides with a statistically significant reduction in CO2 emissions (11.2%). Therefore, it can be concluded that the APLs have been successful, but that they also require improvements in their design to reduce the consumption of water, electricity and of other fuels.