Title: The Compensation Trap: The Limits of Community-Based Pollution Regulation in China
Abstract: Vol. 29 750,000 premature deaths annually. 1About 300 million Chinese people drink contaminated water on a daily basis, and 190 million of them suffer from related illnesses. 2Moreover, sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities are in China. 3 Neighbors including Russia, South Korea, and Japan have long suffered from China's pollution, which increasingly influences more distant regions.A striking example is that on some days, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), twenty-five percent of suspended air particulates in Los Angeles originate from the People's Republic. 4 China also became a dominant factor in global climate change when it surpassed the U.S. in 2006 as the world's number one producer of greenhouse gases. 5 To control environmental risks, industrialized countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) have applied a combination of regulatory instruments but with mixed success.Direct legal instruments, in which a government sets standards and issues permits to polluting facilities, dominated the early regulatory landscape. 6 In later years, economic market-based instruments, such as discharge fees, pollution taxes, and emissions trading systems, 1.