수질과 환경기초시설 = Water Quality and Environmental Treatment Facilities

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

It has been argued that investment in basic treatment facilities could have both a direct improvement effect and an indirect diversion effect on water quality. The reason why the investment in basic treatment facilities could have a negative diversion effect is that the investment in treatment facilities could affect a budget-constrained regulatory agency`s choice in a way that would perversely encourage the regulated firms` emissions, giving a negative result in terms of water quality. We have reviewed the Korean experience and tested if the treatment facilities have improved water quality since 1991. Using a two-stage least-squares method we have shown that building treatment facilities has contributed to improving the water quality even with consideration of the negative effect through reduced enforcement effort. The model and results draw attention to the importance of optimally balancing efforts to build wastewater treatment facilities with efforts to set and enforce regulatory standards.