On A Political Solution to the NIMBY Conflict

摘要

Scale economy in the construction and operation of public facilities, such as landfills, calls for cooperation among communities to build a common facility (Arthur O'Sullivan, 1993). Such a facility is a mixture of a public good and a private bad and, hence, leads to strong opposition by communities to locate it in their vicinity (Bruno S. Frey et al., 1996). This is one of the most serious environmental concerns of recent years, and is known as NIMBY: "not in my backyard." In this paper we study the hypothesis that a democratic political process creates an adequate mechanism for the resolution of the NIMBY conflict. The intuitive explanation is simple. A NIMBY conflict is likely to induce lobbying and symmetric pressures by all threatened communities in the relevant region. As is well known (Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman, 1994), when subject to symmetric pressures, politicians stick firmly to principles and function most efficiently.