'Green tape' cleared of economic villain role

“Green tape” is not the economic villain it is claimed to be.

A story in the Sydney Morning Herald headed: “OECD says green tape is not damaging the economy” point to research that disproves the theory that green tape is prohibitively costly.

“But the economists at the OECD have made a surprising discovery: green tape might not cost nearly as much as politicians and business leaders claim. The Organisation has created an index that calculates the explicit and implicit cost of environmental policies.

“Its economists used this index to assess the strictness of environmental regulations across 24 wealthy OECD members – including Australia – between 1990 and 2012 and to measure the effect of those regulations on productivity,” the story reports.