Abstract
Environment agencies in developing economies demonstrate a poor level of enforcement of environment policies. Command and control measures though widely used, perform poorly due to limitations of the political institutions that are responsible for their monitoring and enforcement. The main objective of this research is to understand and evaluate the shortcomings of government regulatory agencies in developing countries that could explain why even systematically laid-out environmental laws often fail to demonstrate expected results. Several empirical studies found in literature observe policy outcomes such as air quality, probability of inspections, or compliance costs as measures of enforcement in an effort to understand if increase in enforcement leads to greater firm-level compliance. This study, however, aims to use an innovative approach to measure enforcement levels in different Indian states and attempts to look at the political, social, and economic factors that could explain the differences between the states.
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