Municipal waste management in the light of C. Wolf's non-market supply features

Abstract

Experience from economic crises has shown that there is no ideal mechanism for delivering goods. It turned out that the market and the state are unreliable in certain situations. Contemporary economies are mixed systems, hence the theory of economics tries to answer the question what goods should be provided by the state by means of a non-market mechanism. In the theory of state failure, C. Wolf presented a taxonomy of the characteristics of non-market demand and supply, which can be used to classify a product into a market type or a non-market type. Municipal waste management is an element of environmental protection, which after Poland's accession to the European Union is one of the priorities and most expensive tasks of the state. Delivering goods in this area requires making a decision on the method of their delivery, which is important from the point of view of the effectiveness of spending public funds. It is possible to choose between a market-based and a non-market way of delivering goods. The essence of the problem, which is a consequence of the failure of the market mechanism and the failure of the state, comes down to defining the nature of the good; market or non-market. The aim of the presented article is to check, using C. Wolff's taxonomy, whether municipal waste management is a market or non-market product.

Keywords

• C. Wolf's theory
• municipal waste management
• nonmarket mechanism
• non-market supply