Scarcity and Growth Revisited: Natural Resources and the Environment in the New Millenium

ISBN-13: 9781933115115 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 292 str.

R. David Simpson; Michael A. Toman; Robert U. Ayres

Opis

In this volume, a group of distinguished international scholars provides a fresh investigation of the most fundamental issues involved in our dependence on natural resources. In Scarcity and Growth (1963) and Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979), researchers considered the long-term implications of resource scarcity for economic growth and human well-being. Scarcity and Growth Revisited examines these implications with 25 years of new learning and experience. It finds that concerns about resource scarcity have changed in essential ways. In contrast with the earlier preoccupation with the adequacy of fuel, mineral, and agricultural resources and the efficiency by which they are allocated, the greatest concern today is about the Earth's limited capacity to handle the environmental consequences of resource extraction and use. Opinion among scholars is divided on the ability of technological innovation to ameliorate this new scarcity. not be successfully overcome without significant advances in the legal, financial and other social institutions that protect the environment and support technical innovation.

Spis treści

1: Introduction; 2: Mineral Resources and Consumption in the Twenty-First Century; 3: Economics of Scarcity; 4: Ecosystem Goods and Services and Their Limits; 5: Emerging Scarcities; 6: Sustainability and Its Economic Interpretations; 7: Resources, Scarcity, Technology and Growth; 8: Endogenous Technological Change, Natural Resources, and Growth; 9: Evolutionary Analysis of the Relationship between Economic Growth, Environmental Quality, and Resource Scarcity; 10: Environmental Policy as a Tool for Sustainability; 11: Public Policy; 12: The Marvels and Perils of Modernity; 13: Intragenerational versus Intergenerational Equity; 14: Sustainable Economic Development in the World of Today's Poor