The treatment of rural domestic garbage belongs to private goods, but with the continuous increase of domestic garbage output, the traditional harmless treatment method can no longer meet the practical needs, and the private treatment method has caused negative externalities of environmental pollution in public spaces. Under the problem of "hitchhiking" behavior of garbage disposal leading to the failure of voluntary supply and the economic efficiency of centralized garbage disposal supply in public ponds, domestic garbage disposal is in trouble. From the perspective of public economics, this paper analyzes the reasons behind it with the models of supply and demand theory and externality theory, and puts forward the solution of multi-center governance.
Keywords: externality of rural domestic waste, polycentric management of pond resources
I. Introduction
The author was born and raised in a small village in Fuyang City, northern Anhui Province. Gone are the days when I was a child in a pond, when I walked on the ice in winter and swam in the water in summer. The reality is that with the development of modern social economy and the improvement of people's living standards, rural families produce a lot of domestic garbage, which can't be solved by traditional composting, not to mention solid garbage such as glass. In rural areas that lack environmental protection services such as urban garbage disposal, the realistic treatment method is limited to the odor when burning, and the household-based farmers directly dump useless waste into the ditch or remote pond at the door. The ditch with water stinks, and the garbage is flying all over the sky when the dry river is windy.
There are many literatures about rural garbage disposal in China, especially papers. The researchers studied the generation mode, classification and harmless treatment of rural garbage, legal problems of garbage disposal, fiscal and taxation problems of garbage disposal, unbalanced regional development, environmental and ecological problems, .......................................................................................................................'s research on the engineering technology of garbage disposal is not perfect, and most of them either proceed from the current situation to simple policy suggestions or solve problems from the perspective of engineering technology, without digging deep into the economic principles behind them. This paper focuses on the present situation and predicament of rural domestic waste treatment in northern Anhui plain, trying to restore the economic theory behind social phenomena, and finally settle on the solution strategy under the theory of multi-center governance.
Second, the supply and demand analysis of rural domestic waste treatment
(A) the definition of nature-personal belongings of micro-individuals
Rural life usually takes the family as the unit. Here, it is simplified to regard each family as a rational decision-making individual. Daily activities in each yard will produce a certain amount of garbage, and the garbage disposal in this relatively closed yard has the characteristics of personal items. According to the classification standard of private articles-an article is both exclusive and competitive. When adding a household's garbage disposal, MC resource cost >; 0 ; At the same time, it is easy for a family to be exclusive when dealing with garbage, so the household garbage disposal is defined as personal belongings here.
What needs to be distinguished is that "rural garbage disposal" is often regarded as a resource-based project because when rural environmental sanitation is regarded as a whole, it is competitive but not exclusive. Rural residents are enjoying the environmental improvement brought by domestic garbage disposal, and other residents cannot be excluded from enjoying this clean environment, which is the non-exclusiveness of domestic garbage disposal; However, when the number of residents discharging garbage increases, the amount of domestic garbage will also increase, which will lead to the increase of garbage disposal cost. The marginal cost of providing this resource is greater than zero, which is the competitiveness of domestic waste treatment.
(B) has been "crazy growth"-analysis of supply and demand of domestic waste treatment
The improvement of farmers' material level is far higher than the improvement of public services they should enjoy. The amount of domestic garbage produced is much higher than the amount that can be degraded by ecology. Under the background of the serious shortage of environmental sanitation facilities and the continuous improvement of living standards in rural areas, the amount of domestic garbage is growing rapidly, and the demand for garbage disposal is increasing day by day.
The following figure analyzes the demand of domestic waste treatment. The demand for personal goods has the nature of horizontal sum. Suppose that in a perfectly competitive market, there are only two decision makers in the market, family A and family B. The demand curve of family A for garbage disposal is d 1, and that of family B is d2. The demand curve of families A and B shows how much they are willing to pay for a certain amount of garbage. To get the market demand curve, we only need to add up the demand of each household at each price level. As shown below, when the price is P 1, the total market demand is Q 1+Q2.
Summarize the demand of domestic waste treatment at any price level horizontally, and get the demand curve of the whole village market at a certain price level. The following is the analysis of supply and demand. Assume that the effective supply of the village is as shown in the following figure, and the demand curve D and the supply curve S of domestic waste treatment intersect at the equilibrium point A( Q*, P*), and the Pareto equilibrium is reached at this time. In fact, due to the large amount of garbage produced by each household, the harmless treatment capacity is limited, and the actual demand is Q*, while the actual supply is Q 1, which has caused the welfare loss in the ABC Triangle area, and the resource allocation has not reached the optimal level at this time.
Second, the development status of rural domestic waste treatment
The "indigenous method" emphasizes economic rationality-waste recycling and composting.
The treatment of rural domestic waste should first follow the principle of recycling and being used as fertilizer. Such as plastic bottles, waste paper boxes, scrap iron and so on. What can be recycled is kept, and then it is sold after it has accumulated to a certain extent, and a certain income is obtained. In addition, composting is a way to treat organic waste, such as kitchen waste, human and animal manure and so on. Small-scale peasant families usually compost to a certain extent before returning to the fields as fertilizer for crops. This kind of treatment with the concept of "green development" is first of all economic rationality, so the overall welfare of the family will be improved; Secondly, there is positive externality in public space without property right definition.
The general definition of externality refers to the existence of some variables that enter the utility function or production function of an economic entity (individual or company I) in the economy, although the existence of these variables is controlled by another economic entity (J) that has no influence on I and has not paid remuneration. As for utility, the utility U of individual I depends not only on his own consumption, but also on the consumption of another individual J, Ui=Ui (xi, xj). When this influence improves the utility value of others, it is called positive externality.
The following model reveals this positive externality. As shown in the figure below, dd represents the direct and visible benefits brought by domestic waste composting and garbage recycling. The DD curve represents the total social income after considering the welfare improvement brought by this treatment method to the public environment. SS stands for the total cost of household garbage disposal. The intersection of dd and SS curves is the original intersection (Q 1, P 1), which indicates that the garbage disposal capacity of farmers is Q 1 under natural conditions. However, due to the existence of positive externalities, the actual demand of society for this garbage disposal method will be Q*, that is, if farmers only rely on garbage disposal, welfare losses from Q* to Q 1 will occur.
(B) "New materials" stumped the traditional wisdom-stacking and burning in the open air.
The garbage left after screening can not be solved by traditional composting, and traditional wisdom is helpless to the materials of the new era. Faced with white garbage, solid waste of new materials, or domestic sewage containing chemical substances, rural families have limited ability to solve it, so they have to find a simple and rude way, that is, discharge these sewage into ditches or ponds, dump the garbage on both sides of public roads or ditches, or simply treat it. After all, plastic waste can be burned centrally. As a result, many pollution problems have been caused, such as the cross-flow of smelly water, the flying of white garbage and the choking smell when burning. This can be explained by the negative externality model. The last section expounds externalities, and negative externalities can be explained here. When this influence reduces the utility value of others, negative externalities will appear.
As shown in the above figure, MB represents the farmers' marginal income per unit level of garbage treated by this garbage treatment method, assuming that it decreases with the increase of the treatment level, and assuming that the pollution generated by each unit of garbage treatment remains unchanged. PMC is the marginal private cost of farmers, assuming that it increases with the increase of output. At every level of garbage disposal, the marginal damage or marginal externality cost suffered by village environment is MEC. For a farmer, his maximum disposal capacity should be the intersection of marginal private cost and marginal income, and the level of garbage disposal is Q 1.
From the social point of view, SMC stands for marginal social cost, which consists of marginal cost of farmers and environmental damage MEC. In the figure, the marginal social cost curve is the sum of the heights of MPC and MEC at each garbage disposal level.
The model also shows that if farmers reduce their garbage disposal capacity from Q 1 to Q*, the environmental benefit of the village is the area abfe between Q* and Q 1 under the marginal externality cost curve, which is equal to cdfe. At this time, the welfare lost by farmers is area dcg, the environmental benefit of villages is cdhg, and the net social benefit is equal to the difference between cdhg and dcg, which is dhg. This also shows that reducing farmers' garbage output is the way to reduce negative externalities.
Fourth, the plight of rural domestic waste disposal
(1) Why did the voluntary supply of garbage disposal fail?
1. Individual rationality leads to collective irrationality-hitchhiking
When garbage is effectively treated, it will produce positive externalities. Similar to the analysis in the first section of the second part, the harmless treatment of garbage not only increases the internal income of farmers, but also brings great improvement to the environment. If garbage disposal stations or transfer stations are established to treat garbage harmlessly, the overall welfare will be improved. Why won't villagers volunteer to supply it? Establish the following income matrix for analysis.
The table above shows the game model of collective behavior. Suppose there are two households in the village, and each household needs to pay a fee C for building garbage disposal facilities. After providing domestic waste treatment service, it will earn income R, because the garbage is effectively treated, improving the environment and improving the quality of life, among which C.
(B) the difficulty of public supply-economic efficiency
Although it is generally necessary to distinguish between supply activities and production activities when considering public goods, for the sake of simplifying analysis and convenience, no distinction is made here. More realistically, if the production threshold of an article is relatively high, it will definitely affect the government's provision of the article. This paper only analyzes one aspect of the difficulty of public supply from the perspective of economic efficiency.
The common problem in rural domestic garbage disposal is that the total amount of garbage is large but not concentrated, so it is difficult to form large-scale garbage disposal, which in turn determines the high cost of garbage disposal. Consider the total cost function TC=FC+VC. That is, the total cost of garbage disposal system construction is equal to the fixed cost FC required for infrastructure and the variable cost VC required for operation and maintenance. Under the condition of limited financial resources, it is unrealistic to build large-scale garbage disposal infrastructure in scattered rural areas. Secondly, consider variable costs. If the economic operation is effective, any redistribution of resources will not promote the welfare improvement of some people or a certain group without deteriorating other conditions. Only when the benefits brought by the operation and maintenance of the garbage disposal system exceed all its direct and indirect costs can the project be sustainable. In fact, when the operation and maintenance costs of garbage disposal facilities are higher than their activity income, it is a better choice to let them age.
Because the countryside is scattered, the population density is lower than that of the city. This leads to the difficulty of economies of scale. Economies of scale are characterized by increased output and decreased unit output cost. This decline requires the most effective organization of activities related to the development and maintenance of capital infrastructure. However, due to the current situation in rural areas, small-scale alliances cannot meet the requirements of economies of scale.
Five, rural domestic waste management ideas-multi-center management
In view of the present situation, exposed problems and difficulties of rural domestic waste treatment, the author thinks that the problems can be solved from the aspects of system supply, market-oriented operation and independent governance through the right medicine and multi-center co-governance.
(A) institutional supply: it is strictly prohibited to dispose of it at will-internalization of negative externalities.
For public managers, institutional supply through public policies is one of the ways to solve negative externalities. When rural families solve the problem of environmental pollution, because they do not include the social cost of overflow, the cost they bear is low. At this time, if the social cost of spillover is included in the cost account of farmers, the actual cost will increase and the amount of garbage disposal with environmental pollution will decrease.
As shown in the above figure, Pigou tax is used to tax the unit processing capacity of garbage at this level, and the tax amount is exactly equal to the marginal loss caused by farmers in the level of efficiency output. The above picture is an example of copying Figure 4. In this case, the marginal external cost of the efficiency output level is cd. If the tax of cd yuan is levied on each unit of garbage treated in this way, it can be seen from the figure that the new marginal cost curve of rural households is obtained by adding cd to PMC per unit capacity level. According to the behavior choice of rational people, the processing capacity of rural families will remain at the level that marginal income equals marginal cost. Now this level is the efficiency throughput Q* determined by the intersection of MB and MPC+cd. In fact, this kind of tax forces rural families to consider the external costs caused by him and urges them to deal with these costs effectively. On the one hand, rural families may reduce the output of garbage, on the other hand, reduce the amount of treatment in this negative externality way.
(B) government supply, market-oriented operation
Through institutional supply, from the perspective of public policy, harmful waste's handling of negative externalities caused to farmers solved the problem of cost transfer, reduced the handling capacity of harmful waste, and forced the reduction of garbage output to some extent. However, we still need to pay attention to the disposal of garbage stock. At this time, the government needs to provide competitive and non-exclusive garbage disposal services with the nature of public pond resources.
However, due to the large amount of rural garbage but high treatment cost, and the operation and maintenance of infrastructure have the characteristics of economies of scale, the general towns or village committees can not bear the full cost financially. This time can still be provided by the government. Considering the long-term characteristics, the government "eats up" the fixed cost of garbage disposal facilities, or subsidizes them, and then introduces the market mechanism, that is, the "public * * *-private" industrial structure, which can solve the problem of operation and maintenance costs while providing services. Generally, enterprises will charge villagers, but whether this kind of fee is shared according to the number of heads of households, or equally among households, or according to the garbage output is limited by the length and scope of this article, so I will not discuss it here, but only put forward the management ideas.
(3) Self-governance
Elinor ostrom, a great scholar of public choice school, believes that "self-organization and autonomy in society are actually more effective institutional arrangements for managing public affairs." Although individual rationality will lead to collective irrationality when villagers voluntarily provide garbage disposal, good organization and system design will solve the dilemma of collective action. For small-scale villages with strong collective and clan colors, there will be a voluntary supply of garbage disposal similar to the old squire's free road construction. The existence of good self-organization and strong autonomy foundation will also solve the supply problem of garbage disposal with the consent of most people. And establish a multi-center supervision mechanism to prevent the phenomenon of "hitchhiking" in the process of providing rural garbage disposal. Ostrom's explanation of the realization of supervision system is: supervision, graded sanctions and conflict resolution mechanism. For hitchhiking, villagers' supervision and punishment mechanism can be established to solve the problem of effective supply of garbage disposal.
Conclusion of intransitive verbs
The problem consciousness of this paper is to study the development status, existing external pollution problems and supply problems of a rural domestic waste treatment in northern Anhui, and emphatically analyze the economic principles behind the rural domestic waste treatment behavior with externality theory. The author thinks that the treatment of rural domestic garbage belongs to private goods. In practice, due to the lack of rural garbage disposal infrastructure and services, farmers often adopt the way of self-production and self-sales to solve the garbage disposal problem. However, due to improper garbage disposal, the village public space has negative externalities. However, the voluntary supply of garbage disposal is easy to fail because small farmers unilaterally pursue economic rationality, and public supply is difficult in economic efficiency. Therefore, we should carry out multi-agent joint governance from three aspects: system supply, market operation and independent governance to solve the present situation. I believe I will definitely see the original beautiful countryside in my mind in the future.
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