Negative Externality of Consumption of Plastic Bags

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IA: The article is about “Plastic Bag charged introduced in England”. “Plastic bags used for just a few minutes but take 1000 years to degrade”. Therefore when resources are not used efficiently, market failure arises, which is a situation in which the market does not allocate resources efficiently. Therefore plastic bags are negative externality of consumption, which is when a third party is affected by the consumption of goods and services for which no appropriate compensation is paid. The negative externalities of consumption produced here make the marginal social benefits less than the marginal private benefits. The marginal social benefit is equal to the marginal private benefits plus the external benefits. If the plastic bags are over-consumed, then for some of those goods, the overall cost to society is greater than the benefit received. The graph below shows the effect of a negative externality of consumption. According to the article, people who enjoy free disposable plastic bags enjoy the private benefits of the plastic bag, but there will be external costs for other people. Because this is a free market, consumers will maximize their private benefit, ignore the effects on others and not consume at the socially optimal level, which is MSC = MSB. This means they will over-consume the plastic bags at the output of Q1. We can see that Q1 is not the socially efficient output of Q*, where the marginal costs is equal to the marginal social benefit. Therefore since marginal benefit is not equal to marginal costs, the market failure results in a welfare loss. Therefore a free market is not desirable as maximizing their utility is priority. So government is expected to correct the market failure by choosing to char... ... middle of paper ... ...e government can use to reduce the consumption of the plastic bags without causing a burden to the consumers initially is through funding negative advertising. However this creates opportunity cost, which is the cost of an alternative that much be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. This will cause MPB curve to shift to left, towards the MSB curve. However this is a disadvantage towards the government as it cost a lot for funding advertisement. Therefore this would lead to an increase in taxation causing burden to the consumers whether they consume plastic bags or not. However if only indirect taxes are implemented, the revenue could be useful to fund not only negative advertising, the consumers who wish to relieve the taxation burden could change to other uses to carry their groceries such as a shopping bag that can be used over many times.

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