the early history of modern ecological economics abstract this paper provides a historical perspective for the discussion on ecological economics as a special field of research by studying the historical background of ecological economics the present discussions and tensions inside the field might become easier to understand and to relate to the study is inspired by other studies of the emergence of new research areas done by sociologists and historians of science and includes both cognitive and social aspects macro trends and the role of individuals the basis for the paper is a combination of literature studies and interviews with key researchers from the field the story opens with the emergence of the new environmental agenda in the 1960s which was influenced by the scientific development in biology and ecology then it is outlined how the environmental challenge was met by economics in the 1960s around 1970 the basic ideas of ecological economics were given modern formulations but it took a long gestation period from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s before ecological economics took shape during this gestation period the personal relationships between the actors were formed and the meetings that were decisive for the formal establishment of ecological economics took place

are emotions to blame the impact of non analytical information processing on decision making and implications for fostering sustainability policy advice based on a rationalist perspective to foster sustainable behaviour has approached its limits and gaps in the established models are becoming more and more obvious to better understand how unsustainable choices are made and to foster sustainable decision making alternatives to the rationalist models of human decision making need to be investigated such alternative models have already demonstrated their usefulness in other fields than ecological economics the paper begins with a presentation of conventional models of human behaviour as well as their advances and limitations in ecological and behavioural economics in most of these models the dominance of analytical thinking still prevails i identify this as problematic given the evidence for the influence of emotion and intuition in decision making to offer a perspective on human behaviour that acknowledges this influence dual process models are presented established applications of these models are then used to propose four basic types of explanations for unsustainable behaviour based on these explanations preliminary ideas to promote sustainable decision making are developed these ideas are considerably different from policy implications of the established economic model

nonconvexity efficiency and equilibrium in exhaustible resource depletion we consider the problem of efficiency and existence of a competitive equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets where extraction costs are nonconvex nonconvexity is shown to imply that 1 efficient extraction ceases to the left of the minimum efficient scale i e where average costs exceed marginal costs and 2 a competitive equilibrium does not exist introduction of a backstop technology which induces a flat portion of the industry demand curve restores both existence and efficiency provided that the backstop price is sufficiently low if firms face even a small amount of uncertainty regarding their rivals stocks a backstop technology is sufficient to restore existence of competitive equilibrium even if the backstop price is very high in this case however the competitive equilibrium is not efficient

a microeconometric test of the theory of exhaustible resources abstract this paper generalizes extant developments of the economic theory of exhaustible resource production derives and extends a halvorsen and smith 1991 quarterly journal of economics 106 123 140 type test of the theory and applies the test to a sample of natural gas resources to facilitate our empirical test we extend the model developed in chermak and patrick 1995 journal of environmental economics and management 28 174 189 to explicitly account for the fact that the extracted resource gross product must be processed to obtain the final saleable product duality theory is used to derive econometric models with which the theory is statistically tested using panel data from 29 natural gas wells shadow prices of the resource stock through time which are generally unobservable but necessary for the test are estimated via the indirect cost function contrary to the extant literature we find inter alia that i at any point in time ceteris paribus the in situ resource price a decreases with gross production and b increases with final production and ii we cannot reject the theory of exhaustible resources i e producer behavior is consistent with the theory

the elephant in hotelling s room this paper questions the assumption commonly used in theoretical and policy research that scarcity rents make up a large proportion of market prices for oil and coal we show that the empirical literature simple calculations of historical and future scarcity rent shares and possible theoretical explanations all imply the same overall conclusions that scarcity rents seem to have been marginal or non existent historically that they almost certainly do not dominate fossil resource prices today and that there will be other factors shaping the prices in the upcoming decades we therefore argue that using the scarcity rent as the main or only basis for policy or for explaining empirical outcomes is ill advised

sustainability of diets from concepts to governance abstract the production of food for consumption produces environmental stress and raises ethical issues as humans are able to choose different foodstuffs in their diets food consumption guidance may have large benefits for the environment meat consumption is often identified as the most environmentally harmful foodstuff to produce and animal welfare and rights issues are receiving ever more attention by combining both issues this article proposes a conceptual framework for combining alternative dietary habits and agricultural production styles in general environmental policy strategies two means to lower meat consumption are proposed 1 redeveloping the pigouvian food taxation system introduced by goodland 1997 in which foodstuffs are taxed according to their environmental burden an elaborated version could also include an ethical tax that incorporates consumers attitudes on animal welfare and a coefficient that takes into account the inherent value of animals 2 taking the composition of a national stockpile as a starting point and designing the agricultural production system from a combined environmental and ethical perspective in this system the environmentally and ethically preferable foodstuffs would be purchased by the government and sold to the global markets the premiums between these two prices would constitute the subsidies for the national production

alternative models of individual behaviour and implications for environmental policy abstract most insights of environmental economics are in line with the standard neoclassical economic model of rational behaviour formulated in terms of maximization of utility in general or of profits in particular the standard theory of environmental policy is a case in point however the maximization hypothesis and its methodological foundation have been criticized on many grounds related to a lack of either logical or empirical content moreover over the years a great many alternative models of behaviour have been proposed both criticism and alternatives are surveyed here attention is devoted to relevant insights from the philosophy of science the notion of methodological individualism and other criticism the alternative behavioural models include bounded rationality and satisficing lexicographic preferences habitual behaviour incommensurability and multicriteria evaluation and various models of behaviour under uncertainty major implications of the criticism and alternative models of individual behaviour for environmental policy theory are outlined

economics of sustainability or the sustainability of economics different paradigms this article reviews different views of neo classical and ecological economics on the sustainability of economic growth and welfare neo classical economics concludes that due to substitution and technical progress consumption can be sustained even if production depends on a natural resource that is being depleted if production depends on an essential renewable resource there is a level of consumption that can be sustained forever pollution lowers the level of consumption that can be sustained if production depends on an exhaustible resource recycling of waste is insufficient for sustaining consumption unless 100 recycling is possible sustainable economic development is possible if the resource growth potential exceeds the sum of the discount rate minus the rate of exogenous technical progress and if resource productivity is sufficiently high in addition intial levels of environmental quality a composite of pollution and natural resources and man made capital influence the possibilities for sustainable economic development if the resource stock itself affects utility or if irreversibilities occur optimal consumption and extraction are lowered ecological economics states that substitution possibilities are restricted full recycling of waste is impossible and the limited influx of solar energy poses an additional constraint on the level of production that can be sustained since the functions of the environment production factor consumer good and waste sink are intertwined this life support function poses a restriction on economic growth as well in ecological economics development is viewed as an evolutionary process with continuous feedbacks between a changing economy and environment welfare is not merely the sum of discounted individual preferences but requires environmental compatibility and the explicit collective formulation of policies regarding the conservation of species ecosystems and natural resources

inequality and the territorial fragmentation of solidarity a long tradition of research has shown decentralized political struc tures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality this article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality i argue that the distribu tive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequal ity therefore the political choice between alternative fiscal structures is largely driven by their expected distributive consequences as a result the territorial structure of inequality becomes an important factor to explain why some fiscal structures are more integrated than others two mechanisms link regional income distributions and preferences about the decentralization of redistributive policy differences in the demand for redistribution associated with interregional income differences and dif ferences in the demand for social insurance associated with the incidence of labor market risks i test the argument using a data set of fourteen countries in the orga nization for economic cooperation and development oecd over the period 1980 2000 in addition i illustrate the potential of the approach by analyzing why social solidarity remains territorially fragmented in the european union despite the fact that it has a common currency and a common market

on measuring natural resource scarcity conclusions concerning trends in natural resource scarcity may depend critically on the choice of scarcity index unfortunately the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries has hindered the use of some otherwise desirable scarcity measures in this paper duality theory is used to derive an econometric procedure for estimating one such measure the shadow price of the resource in situ empirical results for the canadian metal mining industry indicate that resource scarcity as measured by this shadow price has decreased substantially over time

the flypaper effect what happens to a state s spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government the standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes or roughly 5 10 percent for most states in contrast numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more with some estimates near 100 percent this result is known as the flypaper effect since the money appears to stick where it hits the authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms

resource prices and planning horizons abstract this paper shows that a seemingly simple assumption that agents use a rolling planning horizon can reconcile the puzzling long run price dynamics of exhaustible resources such as oil gas and metals a rolling horizon has the effect of removing the scarcity consideration of resource owners when stocks are large hence extraction will be non decreasing and resource prices non increasing for a long period of time and there will be no connection between the price growth and the interest rate in line with the trends of a majority of exhaustible resources in the last century a calibration of the model to the oil market yields a price which closely fits the gradually falling real oil price after wwii and the sharply increasing price after 1998 this suggests that while long run scarcity was not an important parameter on the oil market in the 20th century it has been important in shaping the oil price from around 1998 and onwards

exploring futures for amazonia s sierra del divisor an environmental valuation triadics approach to analyzing ecological economic decision choices in the context of major shifts in boundary conditions abstract this text presents a new methodological approach to ecological economic analysis employing georgescu roegen s flow fund theory of economic process it offers an alternative to monetary valuation based analyses and aims to contribute toward advancing work concerned with addressing complex ecological economic questions as complete wholes the methodology is demonstrated through reference to the empirical case of a proposed rail link between peru and brazil which would cut across the sierra del divisor of western amazonia connecting the pacific and atlantic coasts and further opening up the amazon commodity frontier in order to analyze the potential impacts of the rail link four flow fund representations of economic process two at the regional and two at the local level are developed in order to juxtapose two alternative political economy contexts that might govern the rail link s impacts in the region one where conservation is prioritized over cash income and one where it is not our results suggest that completion of the rail link under the current political economy context which prioritizes cash income over conservation is likely to have substantial negative consequences for forest conservation in both peru and brazil and for local livelihoods throughout the region

embeddedness and regional integration waiting for polanyi in a hayekian setting this article analyzes the social potential of regional integration pro cesses by using the example of european integration recent case law from the european court of justice has led some observers to argue that judicial decisions increasingly provide european politics with a polanyian drive we test this claim by distinguishing three dimensions to european economic and social integration market restricting integration market enforcing integration and the creation of a european area of nondiscrimination we also identify two forms of integration that have different speeds scopes and potentials political integration and judicial inte gration the evidence shows that the eu has come closer to hayek s vision of inter state federalism than is usually warranted because market enforcing integration and european nondiscrimination policies have asymmetrically profited from integra tion through law the opportunities for international courts to push ahead market enforcing integration increase as the participants of regional integration processes become more diverse in such hayekian constellations individual rights are increas ingly relocated to the central level at the cost of subordinating the decentralized capacity for solidarity and interpersonal redistribution above all the great transformation tells of the conflict between the imper atives of a capitalist world economy and the pursuit of social welfare within nation states polanyi s account of the 1920s and 1930s analyzes the incom patibility of international capitalist arrangements with both democracy and the social reforms that had been won by the european working classes

a matter of opinion how ecological and neoclassical environmental economists and think about sustainability and economics abstract the differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations however we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective this paper presents empirical results from a german case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics how they group around these issues how they feel about the current scientific divide and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research we analyze the data using cluster analysis based on a literature survey we generated forty sustainability economics related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements in evaluating our survey results we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do or do not represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics we also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas key results of the study are we identify two primary scientific clusters one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological economics school of thought and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view yet there are some surprising exceptions both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological societal and economic dimensions three pillar concept and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society we also find a shared critique of pure economic growth strategies in our sample these shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research yet the research agenda of the ecological economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics primarily related to social distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability including appropriate environmental policies

hotelling confronts capm a test of the theory of exhaustible resources a model of pricing of natural resource commodities that integrates financial and product markets is derived and tested the model unifies two strands of the economic and financial literature one that builds on the hotelling model of pricing of exhaustible resources and the other that extends the capital asset pricing model of pricing risky assets tests of the predictions make use of a cost function that was estimated from a panel of small canadian copper mines young 1992 the authors tests fail to reject the theoretical restrictions that are implied by the hotelling capital asset pricing model

the dynamics of willingness to consume abstract it is increasingly acknowledged that the growing consumption in the north constitutes an important part of global environmental problems to improve the possibilities of dealing with this aspect of the problems this paper explores some of the driving forces behind the growth in consumption the first section introduces the environmental debate on consumption including the relationship between final consumption and the consumption of resources the recent political acceptance of dealing with consumption and the fundamental conditions for consumption growth in the north in the following sections a cross disciplinary approach is applied in a broad search for the driving forces behind the willingness to consume throughout the exposition two questions are explored 1 why are productivity increases largely transformed into income increases instead of more leisure 2 why is such a large part of these income increases used for the consumption of goods and services with a relatively high materials intensity instead of less material intensive alternatives the explanations are divided into three groups first the economic explanations including socio economic aspects related to the institutional set up of the economy second socio psychological explanations focusing on consumption from the perspective of the human being embedded in specific social relations third historical and socio technological explanations focusing on different aspects of everyday life the paper concludes with some reflections on the political implications of the analysis

a test of the theory of exhaustible resources an empirical test of the theory of exhaustible resources requires an estimate of the time path of the shadow price of the unextracted resource that generally is not observable because of the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries in this paper we use duality theory to derive an econometric model that provides a statistical test of the theory of exhaustible resources a restricted cost function is used to obtain estimates of the shadow prices of unextracted resources the procedure is illustrated with data for the canadian metal mining industry for this industry the empirical implications of the theory of exhaustible resources are strongly rejected

testing the efficiency of extraction from a stock resource the theoretical conditions for efficient extraction from a known stock resource by a competitive mining firm are reviewed these conditions are tested using proprietary data from a mining firm output price data and coefficient estimates from a translog cost system are used to compute the in situ value of the resource and the stock effect changes in the in situ value over time are then statistically compared with the expected price path the results reject the hypothesis that the data are consistent with the theoretical model and the maintained hypotheses variations of the basic model that incorporate a time varying discount rate an alternative expected price series and a constraint on the rate of output are also tested and rejected 46 references 10 tables

the pricing of oil and gas some further results the hotelling valuation principle hvp implies that the unit value of an exhaustible natural resource can be written as a function of its current price net of extraction costs other variables such as interest rates have no additional explanatory power the results of earlier tests using data from 1979 1981 strongly support the hvp this paper presents a series of follow up tests using time series cross section data covering the period august 1981 to december 1983 because the variance of petroleum prices in this period was substantially less than in the earlier period the follow up sample proved generally noninformative the sample also contains some observations on oil and gas royalty trusts tests of the hvp using these trust data yielded generally satisfactory results although given the limited sample size the results must be viewed with caution the purpose of this paper is to present follow up tests of the hotelling valuation principle hvp for exhaustible resources the hvp and the earlier tests are described in detail in an earlier paper miller and upton 5 and we will limit ourselves here to a brief summary the principle that the unit price of an exhaustible natural resource less the marginal cost of extraction will tend to rise at the rate of interest was first stated by harold hotelling 2 it follows from intertemporal profit maximization on the part of a price taking owner of an exhaustible natural resource if the unit price of resources net of extraction costs is expected to rise by less than the rate of interest why not extract it now and if it will rise by more why extract any today the hotelling principle has become the standard paradigm for natural resource economics although perhaps more from the absence of any viable alternative than from strong empirical validation earlier tests of the hotelling principle generally based on time series of resource prices have yet to provide convincing support

toward a new welfare economics for sustainability the debate over various definitions of sustainability has for the most part been conducted within the framework of traditional welfare economics discussion has centered on technical issues imbedded within the functional forms of various optimization models especially the coefficient of the elasticity of substitution and the social discount rate two more basic problems are 1 intractable theoretical difficulties within welfare economics call into question the results of traditional models of sustainability regarding intergenerational welfare and 2 equating per capita consumption with welfare contradicts empirical evidence suggesting that the link between happiness and wealth income is relatively weak alternative approaches to measuring well being are being developed and these have great potential to move the sustainability debate forward

on the nonexistence of market equilibria in exhaustible resource markets with decreasing costs this paper examines the existence of competitive equilibria in markets for exhaustible resources where there are initial economies of scale in either the extraction of the resource or the utilization of the resource as an input in production in such instances which are fairly common we find that the classic hotelling rule for competitive extraction does not apply since competitive price equilibria generally do not exist this is in marked contrast to static markets where the usual textbook example of firms with u shaped average cost curves is not inconsistent with the existence of competitive equilibria furthermore oligopolistic market equilibria in which resource firms act as nash producers may also fail to exist when there are returns to scale in production

exploration and development of u s oil and gas fields 1955 2002 we study the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the u s over the period 1955 2002 we make four contributions to explain the economic evolution of the oil and gas industry during this period first we derive a testable model of the dynamics of competitive oil and gas field exploration and development second we show how to empirically distinguish hotelling scarcity effects from effects due to technological change third we test these hypotheses using statewide panel data of exploration and development drilling we find that the time paths of exploration development and total wells drilled are dominated by hotelling scarcity effects finally we offer an explanation for why fixed costs from exploration can make the contracting equilibrium in the mineral rights market efficient

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

the second generation of ecological economics how far has the apple fallen from the tree this paper examines the discourse produced in the academic journal ecological economics from its inception in 1989 and compares this discourse with that of the field of environmental economics i used methods for discourse analysis alceste and iramuteq on 6308 abstracts of papers published in four journals namely ecological economics the journal of environmental economics and management environmental values and environmental and resource economics published between 1989 and 2013 the results suggest that the discourses of ecological economics and environmental economics have grown closer over time the semantic classification of co occurrent terms used in ecological economics indicates increasing significance of the notions of ecosystem services and of monetary valuation i argue that this trend is parallel to costanza s career path which suggests the rise of a tacit recognition of the new environmental pragmatic scientific approach i conclude with some of the implications for ee of promoting this kind of discourse to such an extent

allocation distribution and scale towards an economics that is efficient just and sustainable abstract the practical policy of issuing tradeable permits for depletion and pollution requires for its implementation the clear separation of the three basic economic goals of efficient allocation equitable distribution and sustainable scale economic theory needs to catch up with policy in recognizing that scale issues cannot be reduced to either allocation or distribution

the approach of ecological economics this paper discusses the major tenets of ecological economics including value pluralism methodological pluralism and multi criteria policy assessment ecological economics offers viable alternatives to the theoretical foundations and policy recommendations of neoclassical welfare economics a revolution in neoclassical economics is currently taking place and the core assumptions of welfare economics are being replaced with more realistic models of consumer and firm behaviour this paper argues that these new theoretical and empirical findings are largely ignored in applied work and policy applications in environmental economics as the only heterodox school of economics focusing on the human economy both as a social system and as one imbedded in the biophysical universe and thus both holistic and scientifically based ecological economics is poised to play a leading role in recasting the scope and method of economic science

cost specification and firm behaviour in a hotelling model of resource extraction in applied resource economics much attention has been focused on the ability of the hotelling model to explain observed firm behavior in this paper a preliminary specification search is performed to determine the appropriate cost function parameterization for the firms in the sample before proceeding to the estimation of the euler equation once a cost function specification is chosen the corresponding euler equation is estimated via the generalization method of moments gmm which allows for better estimates of the euler equations than in previous studies even with the preliminary specification search and the use of gmm estimation the behavior of the panel of fourteen canadian copper mining firms in the data set examined does not seem to be consistent with the basic hotelling model used

the art of long term thinking a bridge between sustainability science and politics abstract policy makers are dependent upon scientific knowledge however scientific results cannot be applied straightforwardly in practical decision making we deploy kant s term power of judgment the human capacity to apply general insights to specific contingent situations to show that this problem is systematic rather than coincidental decision making requires the power of judgment to make use of scientific knowledge power of judgment in turns can be supported by heuristics against this background we focus on sustainability politics and outline a heuristic for framing and analyzing sustainability problems because time is a key factor in relation to sustainability we distinguish three distinct concepts of time and argue that the economic concepts of stocks and institutions can be used to foster power of judgment with respect to these time concepts based on these concepts the heuristic serves to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and practical decision making in sustainability politics

a martingale characterization of the price of a nonrenewable resource with decisions involving uncertainty abstract this paper presents a general model of nonrenewable resource consumption and exploration decisions involving uncertainty about the time of occurrence of an event such as exhaustion stock discovery or a substitute development the resulting price process is characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions under which the price is expected to rise at a rate equal to greater than or less than the discount rate the general model is illustrated and the price process and the optimal decisions are characterized by examining the three types of uncertainty indicated above

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

a well based cost function and the economics of exhaustible resources the case of natural gas abstract a cost function for natural gas production is estimated using a pool of data from 29 wells statistically exact tests are performed for parameter stability across locations formations wells and producing firms costs are determined to be inversely related to remaining recoverable reserves and marginal costs of production are decreasing in all cases theoretical implications of these cost characteristics on optimal exhaustible resource extraction are analyzed although marginal cost is decreasing production effects on the resource stock imply that an interior production path may be optimal conditions under which production optimally occurs at the capacity bound are delineated and optimal interior production paths are characterized

neoclassical and institutional approaches to development and the environment abstract institutional economics is suggested as a more fruitful approach to environmental problems than the now dominant neoclassical paradigm the historical background of institutionalism in the united states and europe is given as well as the main characteristics of this approach i e holism emphasis on institutional arrangements pattern modelling and emphasis on the political element of economics differences between neoclassical and institutional economics are elaborated with respect to the concept of economics reductionist versus holistic the approach to decision making aggregated versus highly disaggregated and the view of social and institutional change public choice versus actor network approach

linking material and energy flow analyses and social theory the paper explores the potential of habermas theory of communicative action to alter the social reflexivity of material and energy flow analysis with his social macro theory habermas has provided an alternative critical justification for social theory that can be distinguished from economic libertarianism and from political liberalism implicitly most flow approaches draw from these theoretical traditions rather than from discourse theory there are several types of material and energy flow analyses while these concepts basically share a system theoretical view they lack a specific interdisciplinary perspective that ties the fundamental insight of flows to disciplinary scientific development instead of simply expanding micro models to the social macro dimension social theory suggests infusing the very notion of flows to the progress of disciplines with regard to the functional integration of society material and energy flow analyses can rely on the paradigm of ecological economics and at the same time progress the debate between strong and weak sustainability within the paradigm however placing economics at the centre of their functional analyses may still ignore the broader social integration of society depending on their pre analytic outline of research and the methods used

a bibliometric account of the evolution of ee in the last two decades is ecological economics becoming a post normal science abstract in ecological economics the debate on formalism and formalization has been addressed in the context of a lively discussion on ecological economics as a post normal versus normal science using ecological economics ee as a seed journal and applying bibliometric techniques to all 2533 the articles published in ee from january 1989 to december 2009 we analyze the evolution of the field of ecological economics aiming to shed light on this debate we observe the predominance and increased relevance of certain research topics methodological issues policies governance and institutions and valuation moreover collective action technical change and the environment and values stand as emergent themes of research finally we note that ecological economics experienced an empirical turn reflected in a shift away from exclusively formalized papers towards exclusively empirical and to a larger extent formal and empirical ones the combination of the prominent and emergent topics and the empirical turn mirrors the increasing awareness among researchers in the field of the need to address a key specificity of ecological economics the interdependence of the economic biophysical and social spheres on this basis we argue that at least through the lens of ee ecological economics has evolved towards a post normal science

weak comparability of values as a foundation for ecological economics the main argument of this paper is that weak comparability of values should be seen as one characteristic feature of ecological economics the formal properties of the concepts of strong comparability implying strong or weak commensurability and weak comparability implying incommensurability will be clarified multicriteria evaluation offers the methodological and mathematical tools to operationalize the concept of incommensurability at both macro and micro levels of analysis the concept of incommensurability of values already has a long tradition in economics moreover we will show that analytic philosophy theories of complexity post normal science and the recent theories of rationality lead with different trajectories to a non algorithmic approach which in our view could be implemented by some forms of multicriteria evaluation 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

reviving leviathan fiscal federalism and the growth of government this article revisits the influential leviathan hypothesis which pos its that tax competition limits the growth of government spending in decentralized countries i use panel data to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization over time within countries attempting to distinguish between decentralization that is funded by intergovernmental transfers and local taxation first i explore the logic whereby decentralization should restrict government spending if state and local governments have wide ranging authority to set the tax base and rate especially on mobile assets in countries where this is most clearly the case decentralization is associated with smaller government second consistent with theoretical arguments drawn from wel fare economics and positive political economy i show that governments grow faster as they fund a greater portion of public expenditures through intergovernmental transfers

the evolution of preferences why sovereign preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it abstract the conventional economic paradigm assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenous to the economic system and that the economic problem consists of optimally satisfying those preferences tastes and preferences usually do not change rapidly and in the short term this assumption makes sense sustainability is an inherently long term problem and in the long run it does not make sense to assume tastes and preferences are fixed and given if preferences are expected to change over time and under the influence of education advertising changing cultural assumptions etc the old assumption of consumer sovereignty is not adequate different criteria of optimality are needed how preferences change how they relate to the goal of sustainability and how they can or should be actively influenced to satisfy the new criteria needs to be determined ecological economics has emphasized the three rank ordered goals of ecological sustainability fair distribution and allocative efficiency this paper examines how preferences evolve and change over time and the implications of this for developing policies that meet these three goals in democratic societies

mineral depletion with cost as the extraction limit a model applied to the behavior of prices in the nickel industry abstract this article follows papers by pindyck and heal and barrow in applying a hotelling type depletion model to a particular resource industry in this case that of nickel by means of the model the resource rent per ton of nickel is calculated as the proper index of extractive resource scarcity the time path of this resource rent indicates that the model explains industry behavior well and that as in the two previous studies depletion has been an important determinant of prices and rents in this industry

changing concepts of land in economic theory from single to multi disciplinary approaches abstract the role of land in economic theory is surveyed both from a conceptual and historical perspective land has been incorporated in economic theories in various ways originally land used by agriculture was the main motivation for an economic treatment of land this was gradually extended with various other land use categories neoclassical economic theory gave less attention to land use generally regarding land as a production factor of relatively little importance nevertheless specialized sub fields within economics such as regional and urban economics met the demand for explicit spatial analysis including land use considerations attention for environmental and resource problems has stimulated new perspectives on and conceptualizations of land in economic analysis this involves the interaction with other disciplines as well as the use of spatially disaggregated methods of analysis awareness of the richness of ideas on land in economic theory can contribute to enhanced environmental research

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

a model of the operation and development of a national oil company we present a model of the exploration and development activities of a national oil company noc which uses similar technology to a private firm to extract a depletable resource however unlike the private firm the noc may have a wider range of objectives than maximizing the present value of profits specifically we assume an objective function that balances firm profitability against a political desire to favor domestic consumer surplus and domestic employment we find that the non commercial objectives faced by a noc tend to reinforce each other in their effects on profitability the timing of cash flows and employment

a test of the hotelling valuation principle time series tests of the hotelling r percent rule for natural resource prices have not been strongly supportive but the tests and the data are subject to serious difficulties we propose here an alternative testing strategy based on another but less widely known implication of the hotelling model we test this implication which we call the hotelling valuation principle by regressing the market values of the reserves of a sample of u s domestic oiland gas producing companies on their estimated hotelling values we find that the estimated hotelling values account for a significant portion of the observed variations in market values and that the hotelling measures are better indicators of the market values of petroleum properties than two widely cited publicly available alternative appraisals

untested hypotheses in non renewable resource economics the present paper reviews the literature on the empirical implications of the hotelling rule and suggests directions for further research in this area

bridging theories on environmental governance insights from free market approaches and institutional ecological economics perspectives abstract due to methodological problems and their practical limitations the criticism of neoclassical environmental economics is increasing the goal of this paper is to stress the differences and similarities between the two competing alternative approaches institutional ecological economics and free market approaches to environmental protection to encourage their interactions towards a possible synthesis in the future

teaching un sustainability university sustainability commitments and student experiences of introductory economics the three largest public universities in british columbia canada have signed the talloires declaration committing themselves to promoting sustainability and creating expectations that they will integrate sustainability across the curriculum in order to improve students environmental literacy and stewardship about 40 of north american university students take a mainstream introductory economics course few of these students take economics at more advanced levels as such introductory economics courses are an important vehicle for students to learn economic theory they have the potential to contribute to the knowledge that students can mobilize to foster sustainability interviews were held with 54 students who had recently completed an introductory level mainstream economics course at one of the three universities students reported that introductory economics courses place little emphasis on the environment and sustainability they recalled course content with normative connotations that are problematic from a sustainability perspective and they described how discussion of the limitations of mainstream theory was set aside student reports of the insights introductory economics offers into environmental problems imply that these courses are failing to substantively increase students understanding of sustainability and linkages between the environment and the economy findings suggest that current introductory economics curriculum undermines the universities sustainability commitments

unraveling the veil of fuzziness a thick description of sustainability economics this article provides a thick description geertz 1973 of sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010a b have proposed as an alternative to ecological economics the new field of sustainability economics which has triggered various replies the purpose here is to order and to review these contributions building upon a literature review of sustainability economics the paper argues that the concept currently has more of a fuzzy and declamatory character the rhetoric mccloskey 1998 of sustainability economics contains general issues of sustainability economics externalities and the capability approach the article argues that it is currently not clear how the solutions for science and policy proposed by sustainability economics differ from those of ecological economics efforts should be directed towards further development of the theory and the operationalization of sustainability principles the systemic view of co evolutionary development social learning and sustainability economics normative underpinning merits more consideration in the debate about sustainability economics