Author(s)

S. CIHÁKOVÁ AGUILAR, M. CERNÍKOVÁ

Abstract

Since the end of the 1980s, the Czech Republic has faced difficult times in the area of improvement of the living environment. The former socialistic regime originated some of the worst environmental indicators in Europe. Although the state of the environment in the Czech Republic has improved, it is still necessary to ensure a good quality in some particular areas. One of them is the management of depressed areas (Brownfields). The scope of this work is to describe how various schools of economics focus their study on environmental problems, specifically on Brownfield redevelopment. After an introductory part with definitions and a general framework, the paper presents the ideas of environmental economics, free market environmentalism, institutional economics, and ecological economics. Each part is complemented by an overview of empirical research on the field of historical contamination. The last part shows two particular cases in the Czech Republic, where the ecological economics approach has been applied for the assessment of economic effectiveness of remedial processes.

Keywords

Brownfields, cost-effectiveness, ecological economics, economic theory, environmental economics,