Publisher's Synopsis
This major reference book comprises specially commissioned surveys in environmental and resource economics written by an international team of experts. Authoritative yet accessible, each entry provides a state-of-the-art summary of key areas that will be invaluable to researchers, practitioners and advanced students. The handbook contains 79 chapters distributed over 10 main sections:
- introduction
- economics of natural resources
- economics of environmental policy
- international aspects of environmental economics and policy
- space in environmental economics
- environmental macroeconomics
economic valuation and evaluation - interdisciplinary issues
- methods and models in environmental and resource economics
- prospects
Aside from being the most extensive survey of environmental and resource economics available today, the handbook contains several special and unique features. Five of the ten main sections cover topics that are addressed marginally or not at all in previous handbooks or other surveys. Moreover, in addition to overviews of the standard (neoclassical) approach, the book covers core elements of ecological economics in the section on interdisciplinary issues, with a separate chapter comparing neoclassical and ecological economics. The first section includes an introduction and summary of the handbook, as well as a chapter with a historical survey of environmental economics. The final section covers future areas of research from both monodisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives.
At a chapter level the handbook addresses, in addition to standard topics, both less common and recent topics in environmental and resource economics. These include cartels in resource extraction, trade in resources, indicators of resource scarcity, endogenous risk, policy in imperfect markets, transaction costs, the double dividend of ecotaxation, distribution issues, ethics and policy, ethics and valuation, strategic trade, endogenous locations, endogenous growth theory, environmental Kuznets curves, sustainability and sustainable development, the meaning of thermodynamics, analysis of materials flows, the relevance of ecological theory, multi-criteria analysis, computable general equilibrium models, decomposition methods, and ecological economics. Traditional topics are surveyed as well, for instance, externalities, instrument choice, nonrenewable resource extraction, fishery economics, water use, the growth debate, valuation methods and cost-benefit analysis.
A final main advantage of the handbook is that the extensive sub-divisions into topics means that the surveys offer an advanced treatment whilst being concise, authoritative and accessible.
