The paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents competing for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in future periods will be dependent on the agents’ extraction of the resource in the past, even though high exploitation might reduce the stock that future individual...

There is rapidly growing interest in the use of market-based (MB) instruments in environmental policy. The papers in this session discuss three relatively new areas for such policies: groundwater contamination, nonpoint source surface-water pollution and carbon sequestration. The papers point out the potential for MB policies in these areas, but significant challenges remain. This comment highl...

This research evaluates the potential gains in benefits from using Goal Programming to preserve forestland. Twoand three-dimensional Goal Programming models are developed and applied to data from applicants to the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, the largest forest protection program in the United States. Results suggest that not only do these model yield substantial increases in be...

Induced technological change (ITC),whereby the relative price effects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions stimulate innovation that mitigates the cost of abatement, is both tantalizing to decision makers and challenging to represent in the computational economic and engineering models used to analyze climate change policy. This overview reconciles the divergent views of technology and technolo...

This paper assesses the economic impacts of the Swiss climate policy formulated under the Kyoto Protocol; the impacts on the carbon price, the welfare cost, and trade effects are examined. Our analysis is based on a multi-sectoral and multi-regional, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the world economy (GEMINI-E3) which includes a representation of the Swiss economy. The model is use...

The policy recommendations of most economists are based on the rational actor model. The emphasis is on achieving efficient allocation by insuring that property rights are completely assigned and that market failures are corrected. This paper takes the position that so-called behavioral “anomalies” are central to human decision making and therefore, should be the starting point for effective ec...

The design and implementation of environmental policy often involves more than one pollutant, and must consider pollution as a byproduct of the production of marketable output. In this paper, we test the implicit assumption in the empirical literature that (1) production of marketable output, pollution, and abatement are separable, and (2) different pollutants can be abated separately. Using un...

This article studies reproductive externalities within rural communities in poor countries. It is shown that such externalities create a link between household poverty, household size, and the local natural-resource base, each of which is viewed as being endogenous. The models presented here o!er an explanation for the fact that in recent decades large groups of people in various parts of the w...