Reduction of environmental pollution and poverty by contemporary EU environmental policy

Governments have a special responsibility to provide corrective action in the presence of negative externalities because only governments can establish and enforce legal frameworks for regulating the use of environmental resources and transfer resources in this way that different social groups have unique possibilities in order to eradicate poverty. Unidirectional negative externalities are particularly anti-poor. Many potentially environmentally hazardous activities are unjustified not only because of their negative economic impact but also for environmental and poverty reasons. The conventional economic approach to problems is to perceive them in terms of market failure and the miss-allocation of resources. Subsequently, the remedial or policy perspective is explicit in terms of the need to maximize social welfare. According to this viewpoint, justification for government intervention lies in the higher sustainable yield on natural assets and in the reduction of poverty.