Enforcement policies mainly rely on monetary penalties, but also include environmental standards, restrictions, and permitting systems. Additionally, enforcement policies are often implemented by local governments without coordination at the national level, which results in considerable differences in both requirements and levels of enforcement. Also, with the rapid growth in the number of small and medium-sized enterprises, compliance monitoring is often difficult. The main environmental policy instrument applied to industry is the permit system including fees and fines for non-compliance. Most of the collected environmental fees and fines are earmarked for environmental purposes, and make up a major part of the revenues of state environmental funds, or municipal budgets for environmental protection.
Fees are due irrespective of the level of compliance with relevant permits.
Environmental fines are applied when a polluter exceeds the emission limits set in the relevant operation permit. The effectiveness of monetary penalties as an incentive to improving compliance is limited. Furthermore, fee collection rate is far from 100 percent. However, CEE countries are undertaking activities aimed at increasing base fee rates, indexing charges to inflation, and improving collection. Policy coordination, refinement of legislation, better enforcement of regulations, education and institutional strengthening, the development of clean technologies, and priority capital investments for air and water quality are the likely focal points for future environmental actions.