Competitiveness and environmental protection: a dirty dilemma

Environmental authorities are regularly challenged to defend their regulations and policies in terms of how they impose additional costs on business and affect economic competitiveness. This paper discusses the links between environmental protection (and government policies and regulations more generally) and competitiveness. It provides a brief discussion on the nature of competitiveness, presents a Prisoners’ Dilemma model of firm and government strategies that incorporates competition, and briefly relates the results of these investigations to key empirical results from the literature