Environmental regulations impact on agricultural spills and citizen complaints

The paper addresses the regional characteristics where spills occur, if these spills are generating complaints, what types of citizens are doing the complaining, and if environmental policy deters either spills or complaints. The results suggest that distance between livestock producers and both environmentally sensitive areas and people are an effective means to reduce conflicts between farmers and the local community. Another policy question raised in the study was the effectiveness of using citizen complaints as an information tool in addressing environmental quality issues surrounding agriculture. There is a positive influence between spills in a region and the number of complaints suggesting complaints can be used by regulators to indicate problem areas but the information signal will be noisy. Factors such as education and income increase the average number of complaints lodged in a region.