The Urban Environment

Abstract

Public and specialist concern with the urban environment has grown again in recent years and increasingly economists are being drawn into the new debate. There are two main issues being raised: have urban environmental standards declined to unacceptable levels and, assuming they have, how should improvements be achieved? A very clear, and apparently irreconcilable, dichotomy of opinion has emerged within the economic profession over both the gravity of the situation and the appropriate economic action required. Members of one school talk of the dereliction of the city and advocate the abandonment of traditional economic principles and the adoption of more direct controls to alleviate urban pollution and congestion. The alternative view, held primarily by Professor Wilfred Beckerman in the United Kingdom and Edwin Mills in the United States, is that any sub-optimality in urban environmental standards is the result of distortions within various economic markets and that the situation can easily be rectified if the pricing mechanism is correctly adjusted.