Economics of voluntarist approaches in environmental policies with non-perfect competition and cooperation

Voluntarist approaches (VA) are a form of environmental regulation which has been recently developed and which allows companies to voluntarily commit themselves to improve their environmental efficiencies. This work integrates for the first time the role of market structures which prevail both on the polluting industries side and on the cleansing industries side in order to compare some VA with other environmental policy instruments. A VA inspired from a policy introduced in Denmark is compared first with a tax in the framework of an imperfect competition between polluting companies. The same form of VA is then compared to a tax, a pollution quota and a process standard when the cleansing is delegated to an imperfectly competitive industry. Finally, the study of a VA applied in France in the domain of domestic packing wastes allows to compare the theoretical point of view and the real situation. (J.S.)