Backstop technology III. Further developments and applications 7. The economic measure of scarcity 8. Conrad, J. Dasgupta, P. Faucheux, S. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget 4. Howe, C. Pearce, D. Rees, J. Tietenberg, T. Introduction A. Definitions B. Historical perspective C. The students like it. The additional materials that come with the book are also very good. In short, job well done! This is a carefully crafted textbook that should appeal to students from the natural sciences, as well as those from economics and other social sciences.
The text covers a number of important topics that most texts neglect, including agricultural sustainability, the relationship between trade and the environment, and the role of local and national institutions in promoting environment-friendly development. The tone of the book is formal yet friendly, and the layout of text, tables, and figures is top notch.
Each chapter includes numerous useful links to material on the worldwide web. This book should prove popular with students and instructors alike. The production is first-rate — very clear and uncluttered, excellent diagrams and examples, well thought out discussion questions and problems.
The choice and sequence of topics is excellent and you have provided for the right balance between the neoclassical and ecological approaches. It is a most appealing text. Steven Kemp, Curtin University, Australia. Society can reduce pollution by increasing recycling, but this requires other inputs and energy.
Society can reduce pollution by converting bad emissions into less bad emissions. Again, this takes energy. Given the state of technical knowledge, and assuming efficiency in production and full employment of resources, can society hold production, consumption and recycling constant and reduce overall emissions?
Possibly yes if current production processes are inefficient. Given the state of technical knowledge and assuming efficiency in production, can society hold production, consumption, and recycling constant and reduce pollution?
It requires that there is unemployed labor, capital, and energy, and that some of it be allocated to converting pollution to less damaging forms. That is, total emissions would remain constant but we would change their composition. Essential resources like water are also becoming scarce. One of the main challenges of environmental economics will be to articulate incentive structure so that the resources are utilized in a sustainable way and therefore become long lasting and economically meaningful.
Environment turns to Economics with an expectation that it will provide a cost incentive plan to control this pollution to a sustainable level. The concept of market failure The concept of market failure is important in case of environmental problems as in most of the cases market mechanism fails to provide a meaningful solution to environmental resource allocation.
There are many views in ethics regarding how resources should be distributed among individuals. Any one of these can be incorporated within economic models. Indeed many economic models attempt to avoid making value judgments and limit themselves to describing what will happen if a certain policy is followed, and so on.
However some value judgments are widespread in economics. One of these is Individualism, which holds that welfare derives from the preferences of individuals. Nonetheless, the Pareto principle is widely accepted. Note that the compensation is possible but need not actually take place. Ethically, this is much less steady ground. It is a short step from here to the idea of interpersonal comparisons of utility.
If we can compare utility between different people, then we can combine the utilities of different people to give some measure of social welfare. This can be done in many ways, and depends heavily on value judgments. Since an obvious goal for economic policy is to maximize social welfare, being able to measure this has obvious appeal for economists.
However, the idea of comparing utility across individuals is very contentious. Despite the fact that many economists believe that utility can not be compared between different people, the practice is widespread.
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