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What Is Meant by Externalities? How Have Oil Companies in Trinidad and Tobago Employed Solutions to Externalities as Part of Their Corporate Social Responsibilities (Csr)?

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What is meant by externalities? How have oil companies in Trinidad and Tobago employed solutions to externalities as part of their corporate social responsibilities (CSR)?

Externalities exist when a third party bears costs or receives benefits arising from an economic transaction in which he or she is not a direct participant. This occurs when producers or consumers provide benefits to third parties or impose costs on third parties for which the market system does not enable them to receive full payment in return. A harmful externality occurs, for example, when a factory generates pollution. Individuals who live and work in the neighbourhood bear costs arising from the factory's production, including adverse health effects and …show more content…

The Greater Angostura Field project has been designed, constructed, installed, commissioned and operated in compliance with the BHP Billiton Global HSE Management Standards.
• Taxes and Subsidies
Another potential solution to externality problems is to provide subsidies to those whose activities generate significant external benefits and to tax those whose activities create external costs.
• Sale of pollution rights
An increasingly popular approach to the problem of pollution is the sale of pollution rights. Licenses could be sold that give the license holder a right to pollute up to some specific limit during a particular period of time.
• Merger
When the entities generating and absorbing the externalities are firms, merger is a very attractive way of internalizing externalities. After the merger it is in the best interest of the new consolidated firm to consider the effects of its activities (on the previously separate, affected entity) in its decision making process.

Apart from the aforementioned activities of BHP Billiton, BG and BPTT, other firms operating in the oil industry of Trinidad and Tobago have also implemented solutions to externalities as part of their corporate social responsibilities.

• The National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC) has stressed the following goals and principles in their Environment and Safety Policy with regards to operations :
Minimal risk exposure to employees, customers, the public

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