Editors Introduction

AuthorJames S. Shortle,Nick Hanley
Date01 May 2003
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9485.5002007
Published date01 May 2003
EDITORS INTRODUCTION
Nick Hanley
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and James S. Shortle
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Welcome to this special issue of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy. Our
purpose as editors was to commission papers illustrating the great width and
depth of contemporary environmental economics. In the first paper, Geir
Asheim provides a very useful overview of the recent literature on ‘green’
adjustments to the national accounts. Such adjustments have been motivated by
the desire to produce a better measure of welfare, which recognises the inter-
dependencies between the economy and the environment, and to produce a
macro-economic indicator of sustainable development. As Asheim shows, the
information content of green Net National Product is highly dependent on the
theoretical modelling assumptions one makes,
In the next paper, Richard Horan, Jason Shogren and Erwin Bulte introduce
the novel idea of ‘paleoeconomics’. They make use of economic reasoning
understand why a certain class of animals known as mega-fauna became extinct
in North America, but not in Europe atthe end of the Pleistocene period. The
authors note that current explanations are solely along biological lines. Yet
social and environmental systems co-evolve over time, thus seeking explanations
only within one half of this joint dynamic makes no sense. Horan et al. think
about how differences in endogenously-acquired skills and animal responses
could give rise to the patterns scientists observe. This paper is a bold new avenue
for environmental economics research.
A commonly-heard debate which has impacted on organisations such as the
World Bank is whether growth is good or bad for the environment. The
‘Environmental Kuznets Curve’ hypothesis states that rising per capita incomes
in a country will eventually result in lower levels of pollution–in other words,
that the time path of pollution is an inverted U-shape. Annegrete Bruvoll. Taran
Faehn and Birger Strom make use of a Computable General Equilibrium model
of Norway to examine this issue. Emissions are driven partly by endogenously
increasing demand for a cleaner environment as incomes rise (feeing through
emission taxes). The emission-augmenting effect of scaling up aggregate
economic activity can also be counteracted by a greener composition of
production and consumption and technological progress. They find that for
most local and regional pollutants, emission trends are downwards. However,
this is not true for emissions of C02 and some transport-related local pollutants.
In the next paper, we move to the study of how best to estimate demand for
non-market valued environmental goods. The Contingent Valuation Method
n
University of Glasgow
nn
Penn State University
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 50, No. 2, May 2003
rScottish Economic Society 2003, Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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