Abstract
What factors determine federal spending on environmental goods? Is severity of the hazard the only metric of consideration, or do other factors play a vital role in explaining spending? This paper seeks to answer this question and to identify disbursement patterns within the context of the Abandoned Mine Land Fund (AMLF) program, a fund created as an aspect of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. We explore whether political factors, as well as environmental and health factors, have an explanatory role in disbursement of AMLF monies. The political factors examined include environmental interest group influence and legislator preferences and/or pressures to fund sites in their home states or districts. The results found here suggest that there exists a mix of public and private interests present in AMLF disbursement decisions during the overall span of the program, and that political influences have gained strength in the decision-making calculus in response to changes in the funding structure of the AMLF.
Highlights
What are the determinants of federal spending on environmental goods? Is severity of the environmental hazard the only metric of consideration, or do other factors play a vital role in explaining how funding is disbursed? In this paper, we aim to provide answers to these questions, and to illuminate disbursement patterns of monies from the Abandoned Mine Land Fund (AMLF)
We examine whether political factors, in addition to severity of abandoned mine site hazard and general abandoned mine site characteristics, influence the distribution of AMLF monies
This paper examines the question of what determines the size of disbursements from AMLF
Summary
What are the determinants of federal spending on environmental goods? Is severity of the environmental hazard the only metric of consideration, or do other factors play a vital role in explaining how funding is disbursed? In this paper, we aim to provide answers to these questions, and to illuminate disbursement patterns of monies from the Abandoned Mine Land Fund (AMLF). Though the program itself is small, this analytical setting is interesting because of the limited scope of program objectives and the rigidly defined funding source (at least initially) This suggests that the execution of abandoned mine reclamation projects facilitated by the fund should be difficult to influence politically. Within this setting, we examine whether political factors, in addition to severity of abandoned mine site hazard and general abandoned mine site characteristics, influence the distribution of AMLF monies. The paper closest to ours in the Superfund literature is Stratmann (1998), who uses a political economy model similar to ours to look at the geographic disbursement of Superfund expenditures to separate out public interest and public choice influences We use this literature to inform our study of the Abandoned Mine Land Fund.
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