Public Disclosure Programs Research Articles

Transitional Justice and Temporal Parameters: Built-In Expiration Dates?

Abstract Temporal assumptions associated with personnel reforms, such as lustration and public disclosure programs, both prescribe the optimal timing for the onset of measures and proscribe a long duration for such measures. In the context of the post-communist transitions, these assumptions suggested that lustration and public disclosures should be enacted as soon as possible after a regime transition, with the legitimacy, motives, and legal appropriateness of delayed measures being questioned. In terms of duration, personnel reforms should have fixed time limits, often suggested as no more than a decade. This article critically explores the evolution of these temporal assumptions through an examination of the legal rulings, intergovernmental policies, and recommendations of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Venice Commission. The article illustrates the tension between the continued use of the measures by some post-communist states and international rulings signalling their expiration.

“Silent Lustration”: Public Disclosures as Informal Lustration Mechanisms in Bulgaria and Romania

Romania and Bulgaria have lagged behind other countries in Central and Eastern Europe in coming to terms with their communist pasts, thwarting or failing to implement lustration and public disclosure programs. However, starting in earnest in 2006–2008, their secret police file repository agencies began reviewing the former secret police files of tens of thousands of public and semi-public employees and publicly disclosing the findings. The disclosures cover a range of political and social positions, revealing the former regime complicity of many current bureaucrats, business leaders, office holders, and public personalities. There is evidence that the disclosures are catalyzing bureaucratic and moral changes similar to lustration, prompting preemptive employment vetting by employers, selective voluntary resignations by individuals to avoid disclosure, as well as an increase in citizen engagement with the secret police files. The breadth and transparency of the public disclosures suggest a type of informal lustration.

Does Disclosure Reduce Pollution? Evidence from India’s Green Rating Project

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting. We use detailed plant-level survey data to evaluate the impact of India’s Green Rating Project (GRP) on the environmental performance of the country’s largest pulp and paper plants. We find that the GRP drove significant reductions in pollution loadings among dirty plants but not among cleaner ones. This result comports with statistical and anecdotal evaluations of similar disclosure programs. We also find that plants located in wealthier communities were more responsive to GRP ratings, as were single-plant firms.

Public Disclosure Programs vs. traditional approaches for environmental regulation: Green goodwill and the policies of the firm

A Public Disclosure Program (PDP) is compared to a traditional environmental regulation (exemplified by a tax/subsidy) in a simple dynamic framework. A PDP aims at revealing the environmental record of firms to the public. This information affects its image (goodwill or brand equity), and ultimately its profit. A firm polluting less than its prescribed target would win consumer’s sympathy and raise its goodwill, whereas it is the other way around when the firm exceeds its emissions quota. The evolution of this goodwill is assumed to depend also on green activities or advertising expenditures. Within this framework, we analyze how a PDP affects the firm’s optimal policies regarding emissions, pricing and advertising as compared to a traditional regulation. We show that advertising acts as a complementary device to pricing and that emissions are increasing in goodwill. The role of a standard or target level for emissions turns out to be totally different under both policy regimes. In the case of a tax/subsidy approach, this target level only acts as constant who increases or decreases profit by a fixed amount, but it does not affect the policy of the firm. On the contrary, if a PDP is implemented, the target value for emissions enters in an important way in the goodwill accumulation mechanism and determines how the firm reacts to the regulation and what is the time path for the economic and environmental variables. Moreover, this value is also crucial to determine the possibility that a PDP is profit improving. A policy implication of this fact is that regulators should be particularly careful in fixing the emission standard when a PDP is applied. The theoretical results are complemented with a numerical illustration.

Does Disclosure Reduce Pollution? Evidence from India's Green Rating Project

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms' environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting. We use detailed plant-level survey data to evaluate the impact of India's Green Rating Project (GRP) on the environmental performance of the country's largest pulp and paper plants. We find that the GRP drove significant reductions in pollution loadings among dirty plants but not among cleaner ones. This result comports with statistical and anecdotal evaluations of similar disclosure programs. We also find that plants located in wealthier communities were more responsive to GRP ratings, as were single-plant firms.

Environmental performance rating and disclosure: China's GreenWatch program

In this paper we describe a new incentive-based pollution control program in China, in which the environmental performance of firms is rated from best to worst using five colors—green, blue, yellow, red and black—and the ratings are disseminated to the public through the media. We focus on the first two municipal disclosure programs, which have been implemented at very different levels of economic and institutional development. In both cases, the increases in compliance with pollution regulations have been similar to increases produced by public disclosure programs in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The results suggest that incentives created by public disclosure may significantly reduce pollution in China, even though environmental NGO's play little role and there is no formal channel for public participation in environmental regulation.

Incentives for Pollution Control: Regulation or Information?

Empirical analyses on monitoring and enforcement issues have focused attention either on studying the impact of traditional monitoring and enforcement practices on the environmental performance of polluters or on studying the impact of public disclosure programs. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis of the impact of both traditional enforcement and information strategies within the context of a single program. We thus provide insights on the relative impact of the traditional (fines and penalties) and emerging (public disclosure) enforcement strategies. We present evidence that the public disclosure of environmental performance does create additional and strong incentives for pollution control.