市场结构和外部因素：英格兰和威尔士的水污染事件外文翻译.docVIP

原 文： MARKET STRUCTURE AND EXTERNALITIES:THE CASE OF WATER POLLUTION IN ENGLAND AND WALES D. J. STOREY Externality theorists have significantly omitted a number of topics, now within the mainstream of economics, from their study. Where a firm imposes external costs upon others a publicly financed authority is assumed to be established which either imposes effluent taxes or physical controls upon dischargers. Theorists, however, presume that firms only incur abatement costs in pollution control, i.e. firms equate marginal abatement costs to the tax rate or accept unquestioningly the physical limits imposed upon them by the authority. The opportunity for firms in practice to exploit, through appeals, tribunals, etc., the enforcement procedures has demonstrated the naivety of such an assumption. Hence any theory of externalities assuming purely passive roles for both dischargers and enforcement bodies must be inadequate. 1. INTRODUCTION A second major criticism of externality theorists is their presumption that all polluters are profit maximizers (cost minimizers) operating in a perfectly competitive selling market. Even in the few cases where the perfect competition assumption is relaxed, profit maximization remains the presumed motivation. This paper tries to examine the effect of relaxing both these assumptions. It demonstrates it is possible to incorporate within the profit maximizing theory of the firm the opportunity for the use of resources in opposing the authority and shows such theory predicts that firms in non-competitive industries are likely to have an advantage in such conflicts over small competitive companies. However, when the profit maximizing hypothesis is replaced by one suggesting that managers may have similar preferences at work to those which they have as a private citizen, opposite predictions are derived. Here discretionary expenditure—a manifestation of inefficiency would be greatest where market impe