环境与自然资源经济学PPT2 Tietenberg_8e_ppt24_final

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Sustainable Development
• Empirical evidence suggests that increased environmental control has not currently had a large impact on the economy.
• The notion that respecting the environment is inevitably incompatible with a healthy economy is wrong.
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• The capacity of the market for self-healing is not always adequate.
• Government intervention is needed.
• However, government intervention is not uniformly benign. For example, tough legislation and price control are counterproductive.
• Characterizing resource base finite is misleading:
It ignores the existence of a substantial renewable resource;
It focuses attention on the wrong issue; It supports ill-conceived attempts to measure the
size of resource base.
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• Correct conceptualization of the resource scarcity suggests that both extremely pessimistic and extremely optimistic views are wrong.
• Improper incentives and inadequate information are more serious problems.
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Institutional Responses
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Conceptualizing the Problem
• The growth in demand for resources is sensitive to their scarcity, for example, price and population growth.
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• Economic growth will not automatically benefit people especially in developing countries. Environmental problems are severe.
Chapter 24
Visions of Future Revisited
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Addressing the Issues
• How the problem correctly conceptualized? • Can our economic and political institutions
• Externalities are a barrier in the transition to sustainability.
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• Efficient markets do not necessarily produce sustainable development.
• On the positive side, markets have responded swiftly and automatically to deal with the resources with higher prices,
• However, market would not automatically choose a dynamically efficient or a sustainable path for the future.
respond in a timely and democratic fashion to the changes? • Can the needs of the present generation to be met without compromising that of the future generation?
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• The economy is under transformation: the decline in population growth and the rise in importance of information.
• The increasing focus on corporations on corporate sustainability is also important.