Abstract
The 'Sixth Environment Action Program', also known as 'Environment 2010: Our future, Our choice?', devised by the European Commission, highlights how important the scale of action to implement environmental policies is. Even though the classical theory states that markets are able to solve the problem of the allocation of resources efficiently, market failures do exist, and lead to a situation in which markets do not efficiently organise production or allocate goods and services to consumers. As far as environment is concerned, market failures are also known as negative externalities (Pigou), that is to say, that a decision taken by a firm (or the aggregation of all decisions taken by firms), causes costs to the stakeholders more than the person making the decision.
