ECON 225 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Natural Resource Economics, Intergenerational Equity, Environmental Degradation
31 Mar 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Environmental economics is concerned with allocating scarce resources among competing uses. Natural resource economics examines ways to achieve use of our natural environment over time. -energy, forests, land and harvested species such as fish stocks. Equity is about how we split the economic pie up. Horizontal equity: treats similarly situated people the same way. Vertical equity: refers to how a policy impinges on people who are in different circumstances, in particular different income levels. Intergenerational equity: looks at whether future generations have the same opportunities as current ones. Environmental degradation comes from human behavior that is unethical or immoral. This could be solved by raising moral of society. Only way to reduce environmental pollution is to weaken the strength of the profit motive. Lack of ownership rights to environmental resources means that there are few incentives to take the environmental consequences of our actions into account.
