Overview of the theoretical foundations of Porter's hypothesis

This paper reviews in a non-technical presentation some of the theoretical foundations of the Porter Hypothesis that argues that strict environmental regulations may increase the profits of industries that have to respect them. After a short presentation of the hypothesis, some of the arguments based on firms' organizational failures are presented. Arguments based on market failures are then discussed. The main conclusions of this review are: i) the Porter Hypothesis requires the presence of at least one distortion beside the environmental externality, ii) the type of environmental regulations leading to the Porter result depends upon the nature of the interacting distortions. Furthermore, reaching the optimum will usually require using several regulatory instruments, iii) empirical testing of the Porter hypothesis has to allow for the presence of multiple distortions.