One complication is that very few environmental insults occur strictly within the administrative boundaries of one local political authority. Take, for example China's fee system for contributing to water pollution. Water is an ambient commodity and thus does not “belong” to any single place or authority. (The same, of course, is true of air.) China has developed a water-pollution fee system that makes an enterprise pay for polluting the water. The basic fee system itself has flaws. For instance, it requires charges only for the single pollutant the enterprise adds to the water that most exceeds official standards-all other water pollutants discharged from the same enterprise are "free” and need not be controlled. In addition, the fee levied is often considerably less than would be the cost of reducing the offending discharge, and thus a rational enterprise manager in most instances simply builds the fee into the cost of production, rather than abating the environmental offense itself