Special Issue Frontiers In Environmental Economics

This is a book of uncompromising technical excellence, which does exactly what it promises to do: chart the cutting-edge frontiers of environmental and ecological economics, for the benefit of graduate students, professional academics, and policy making elites. The authors are mostly academic leaders in the field, the topics are hot . . . the contributors make the links between abstract theorizing and the concrete mental framing of issues that is a prerequisite for sound policy design . . . The papers in this collection exhibit rigorous and robust analytical frameworks, presented intuitively in clear words as well as mathematically, and harnessed to wide-ranging up-to-date bibliographies which quickly open the door into recent literature . . . this will be a book to keep on a convenient shelf for reference purposes . . . it is hard to imagine a graduate student reading this book and failing to spot opportunities to colonize new theoretical territory beyond the present frontier, or to explore empirically the areas outlined in these chapters. Geoffrey Bertram, Papers in Regional Science Top European and American scholars contribute to this cutting-edge volume on little-researched areas of environmental and resource economics. Topics include spatial economics, poverty and development, experimental economics, large-scale risk and its management, organizational economics, technological innovation and diffusion and many more. The common thread is the language and methodology of economics, yet the work aims to reach an audience wider than academia; others such as researchers and policymakers, in the public sector, professional staff in research institutes and think tanks, and environmental consultants will all benefit from an awareness of these crucial issues which, if not considered now, will become the problems of the future.

This special issue of Environmental and Resource Economics was originally intended to be an 'adversarial collaboration' between an author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (SD, contributing to Stern, 2007), and a critic (DJM, in Maddison, 2007). However, it is testament to the vitality of the discipline that our agenda for this issue has moved on. Rather than convening a symposium on the merits of the Stern Review (of which there have been several, in for instance Climatic Change, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and World Economics), we collect together what are in our view some of the best examples of new economic research on climate change. Taken together, they look beyond the debate about the Stern Review and offer important new insights for the design of future policy.

Many of the frontiers of environmental economics research are at the interface of large-scale and long-term environmental change with national and global economic systems. This is also where some of the most of challenging environmental policy issues occur. Volume 3 of the Handbook of Environmental Economics provides a synthesis of the latest theory on economywide and international environmental issues and a critical review of models for analyzing those issues. It begins with chapters on the fundamental relationships that connect environmental resources to economic growth and long-run social welfare. The following chapters consider how environmental policy differs in a general-equiIibrium setting from a partial-equilibrium setting and in a distorted economy from a perfect economy. The volume closes with chapters on environmental issues that cross or transcend national borders, such as trade and the environment, biodiversity conservation, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global climate change. The volume provides a useful reference for not only natural resource and environmental economists but also international economists, development economists, and macroeconomists.

This text examines some major issues in environmental economics, looking in particular at the issue of unpriced services provided by the environment and how to value them.