Economic instruments for waste management

Economic instruments for the implementation of environmental policies distinguish themselves from traditional tools (the 'command and control' type) for the reason that: they influence the costs and the benefits of the economic agents in question; they change the behaviour of the subjects in question in a way that they guarantee behaviour trends less harmful to the environment; they guarantee the assignment of adequate prices to the natural resources that traditionally don't have a price and therefore are consumed excessively by the economic subjects; normally they impose the transfer of economic resources to the disadvantage of the subjects responsible for the phenomena of pollution; certain objective pollution reduction data guarantee the minimization of the social costs of pollution abatement, that is, of the total costs on the economic system in general (economists define this characteristic as the 'static efficiency'); they guarantee what is called in economical jargon, the dynamic efficiency, i.e., in practice, they determine a continuous incentive for the reduction of the emission of the various pollutants and for the realization of the technological innovations that are able to control the pollution; they are more flexible than the instruments of direct regulation, because they leave the subjects a freedom of choice under different price conditions than in the past; they are flexible as well for the reason that the public operator can intervene rapidly to change the way of application