The general objective of this project is to understand costs of pollution abatement faced by Vietnamese seafood processing industry at firm and sectoral level. Research results would provide authorities in developing regulatory and enforcement strategies driving the sector towards cleaner and leaner production.
Seafood is a large and important sector in Vietnam but is under threat from industrial pollution, low productivity and inefficiency. The Vietnamese Environment Protection Agency considers the following measures: (1) enforcement and monitoring activity of environmental standards in the short, and (2) developing and implementing market-based instrument in the long run.
For the short run strategy, important questions raise include what are economic incentives for seafood processing firm’s compliance with environmental standards? More specifically, what are market-based evidences for revising the current national regulation on the effluent of aquatic product processing industry that has been weakly enforced for SMEs. For the long run strategy, total cost and marginal cost of pollution abatement of the entire industry must be estimated for designing sound policy instruments.
The research objectives of this project are:
- To estimate shadow prices of pollutants in wastewater made by seafood processing plants
- To calculate and simulate total abatement cost of effluents made by seafood processing sectors of the entire industry
Both results are expected to provide a solid evidence package for the management of pollution problems of the fish processing industry in Vietnam, enabling the sustainability of the sector.