Inequities in enforcement? Environmental justice and government performance

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low-income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. Specifically, I analyze state regulatory enforcement of three U.S. pollution control laws-the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act-over the period 1985-2000. To test for disparities in enforcement, I estimate a series of count models and find strong evidence across each of the three environmental laws that states perform less enforcement in poor counties, but little evidence of race-based inequities. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.