The environment has been exposed to a range of damaging contaminants from a wide variety of sources. Regulation of and legislation against offending parties has frequently been hampered because of the difficulty with cooperation among disparate disciplines in the natural, social and political sciences. This volume forms the conclusion of five years' collaboration among toxicologists, economists and lawyers in the understanding and solution of the problem of accumulative chemicals. As well as being a case study of the accumulation of pesticides in groundwater in one particular region (the...

Human induced biodiversity loss is greater now than at any time in human history, with extinctions occurring at rates hundreds of times higher than background extinction levels. The field of biodiversity economics analyses the socio-economic causes of and solutions to biodiversity loss by combining the disciplines of economics, ecology and biology. This field has shown a remarkable degree of transformation over the past four decades and now incorporates the analysis of the entire diversity of biological resources within the living world. Biodiversity Economics presents a series of papers that...

The marginal price elasticities estimated by Martinez-Espineira conforms to expectation. The price specification that accounts for the changing proportion of water users in each block yields a higher elasticity (-0. 47) compared to the spec- ification ignoring this feature of the data. However, this difference is not found to be statistically significant, a result attributed to the low power of the test (small sample size limiting the accuracy of estimates). In conclusion, the paper provides a theoretically correct price specification for demand functions under block pricing and aggregate...

Human induced biodiversity loss is greater now than at any time in human history, with extinctions occurring at rates hundreds of times higher than background extinction levels. The field of biodiversity economics analyses the socio-economic causes of and solutions to biodiversity loss by combining the disciplines of economics, ecology and biology. This field has shown a remarkable degree of transformation over the past four decades and now incorporates the analysis of the entire diversity of biological resources within the living world. Biodiversity Economics presents a series of papers that...

This volume looks at the problem of growth and environment from the perspective of environmental regulation. The context is the current situation in China, where 20 years of rapid growth have created a situation in which there are both demands for environmental regulation and needs for choosing a future development path.