Young Europeans Discuss Sustainable Development

I have been absent from this blog because I have been organising the Young Europeans Discuss Sustainable Development from the point of view of science and technology event:

Young Europeans Discuss Sustainable Development
9-14 of May 2011

Advances in Science and Technology directly affectyour life, and you should have an opinion!

28 Young Europeans (18-24 years old) from 13 EU countries, will be discussing with Greek scientists about6 different aspects of Sustainable development.

at www.ensaa.eu: 

Meet the 23 scientists that will talk at the event! They work at almost all of the big Greek universities and research centres!

Learn about the issues that will be discussed:

Climate Change, Energy, Innovation, Water and Food, Biodiversity, Public Health

Chat with other people!

Check out what will be happening during that week!

Find out about the participants!

Watch online, ask questions for the scientists to answer, vote!

The event language is English.

Please forward this to your members and whoever you think might be interested.

For more information do not hesitate to contact us at yedsda@gmail.com

Dr Ino Agrafioti

Pollution and Environmental Policy: nitrate pollution from agricultural sources in the case of Greece

[short note: as I’ve mentioned before I have started a new masters course in Public Policy and Management. I will be publishing my essays on this blog, and this is one of these essays.]

INTRODUCTION

In an economy that has achieved Pareto optimality (social efficiency), any additional changes in the economy would benefit some people only by making others worse off. In the real world however, markets fail to achieve this social efficiency and one of the main reasons for this, is the existence of externalities.

An externality occurs when the welfare of individuals and corporate profits are affected not only by the actions of individuals themselves or their companies but also from acts of third parties. Whenever these individuals or their companies are affected beneficially, there are said to be positive externalities, whereas whenever these individuals or their companies are affected adversely, there are said to be negative externalities. A common example of a negative externality is environmental pollution. Pollution will be used for now on, instead of the more general term of “negative externality”.