Business Initiatives
Eureau and Skanska urge Council to back Parliament position on REACH
25 October 2006
In an Open Letter from Eureau and Skanska on REACH, EU Ministers responsible for the new EU Chemicals regulation are urged to support the position taken by the European Parliaments Environment Committee.
European Commission: Costs for green policies gross overestimated
18 August 2006
Some gross overestimates in predictions of how much EU environmental polices will costs have been done over the last years. Rows over the cost of green policies have been a constant feature of EU environmental policy making, reaching a zenith in furious arguments over the Reach chemical policy. The European Commission has commissioned a study to investigate why the ex-ante and ex-post estimates of costs to business resulting from EU environmental legislations differ.
The study pinpoints a failure to anticipate technological innovation as the key reason why green laws are so often forecast to be more expensive than they turn out to be.
ChemSec has in an earlier report “Cry Wolf” pointed to a general tendency for business to overestimate costs. In the Commission study additional cases has been investigated. The study concludes that the ex-ante cost estimates are often twice of the later ex-post estimates.
The new report concludes that some overestimation is inevitable. It also implies that the new EU fashion for regulatory flexibility could make accurate predictions even more difficult. But it nevertheless proposes a series of ways in which accuracy could be improved.
Report (pdf)