1. ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ANALYSIS: WHAT AND WHY? Why environmental policy analysis? Environmental issues are growing in visibility in local, national, and world arenas, as a myriad of human activities leads to increased impacts on the natural world. Issues such as climate change, endangered species, wilderness protection, and energy use are regularly on the front pages of newspapers. Governments at all levels are struggling with how to address these issues. Environmental policy analysis is intended to present the environmental and social impacts of policies, in the hope that better decisions...

Economists all too often assume that ecosystem and population dynamics are subject to convex (even linear) processes. However, research by ecosystem and population ecologists has shown that the processes in question are very often non-convex. This has important implications for environmental and resource economics. Typically, a system under study or being managed would contain multiple basins of attraction. So the system would flip from one basin to another if a "threshold" (mathematically, a bifurcation) were crossed. Furthermore, the flip could be irreversible. But even if it were...

USING DISCRETE CHOICE EXPERIMENTS TO VALUE HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development and application of discrete choice experiments (DCEs) within health economics. The use of this re- tively new instrument to value health and health care has now evolved to the point where a general text for practising professionals seems appropriate. The few existing books in this area are either research monographs or focus almost entirely on more advanced t- ics. By contrast, this book serves as a general reference for those applying the technique to health...