the economics of exhaustible " assets presents a whole forest of intriguing problems." 1 Harald Hotelling ) The two energy price shocks in 1973/74 and 1979/80 have arosed interest in the new area of resource economics. The affluent societies of Europe, North America and Japan were confronted with the new scarcity paradigm of the "space ship earth" with only a limited supply of natural resources aboard whereas population is growing and the environment can not accomodate the increasing volume of pollutants. The problem of natural resource scarcity gives rise to the question how...