Rami Benabdelkrim
Economist at Ademe (DSREP)
Associate researcher at Gouvernance and Regulation Chair (Université Paris Dauphine - PSL)
Economist at Ademe (DSREP)
Associate researcher at Gouvernance and Regulation Chair (Université Paris Dauphine - PSL)
I am an Economist at ADEME, within the Directorate for Extended Producer Responsibility Oversight, and an Associate Researcher at the Governance and Regulation Chair, Paris Dauphine–PSL University.
My research focuses on the governance and regulation of the circular economy, with a particular emphasis on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and the organizational arrangements that support its implementation, especially through Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs).
My work combines perspectives from organizational economics, public economics, and regulation to examine how collective institutional designs can address coordination and incentive problems in environmental policy. I rely on both conceptual analysis and quantitative methods, notably econometric approaches, to study how regulatory choices influence the performance of EPR systems.
Empirically, my research has focused on the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and textile industries, but I remain interested in exploring other sectors facing similar challenges in organizing collective environmental responsibilities.
This dissertation analyzes Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) as central organizational instruments in the implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in Europe. EPR aims to internalize end-of-life externalities by transferring to producers the financial and sometimes operational responsibility for waste management. This transfer redefines the boundaries of responsibility and gives rise to new, often complex, organizational arrangements, of which PROs are the embodiment. The dissertation adopts an organizational economics perspective, drawing on incentive theory, institutional analysis, and industrial organization to understand how PROs structure their organizational choices in response to the institutional and operational constraints of EPR.
Chapter I lays the theoretical and empirical foundations, articulating the economic, political, and organizational issues related to EPR, with a focus on the WEEE sector. Chapter II shows that PRO design choices (ex ante financing, cost pooling, flat-rate fees) create an informational lock-in that neutralizes incentives for eco-design. Chapter III develops a typology of PROs based on European data and highlights differentiated performance depending on the degree of organizational integration. Chapter IV adopts an industrial economics perspective and shows that the generalization of multi-product PROs leads to inefficiencies linked to the heterogeneity of waste streams. The dissertation concludes that PRO organizational choices are neither neutral nor secondary: they shape incentives, structure interactions among actors, and determine the overall performance of EPR systems. It calls for rethinking regulation by fully integrating the organizational and sectoral dimensions of EPR schemes.