We argue that intergenerational neutrality has been prematurely excluded from the dialogue on sustainable growth. By incorporating Burton’s distinction between intragenerational and intergenerational discounting into a model suitable for analyzing sustainability issues, we are able to...

We develop an optimizing model of a farm that is subject to invasion by an infectious disease such as bird flu, where the probability of invasion depends on the degree of free-ranging on the farm and post-invasion rate of spread on the farm depends on the farm size, the farmer's surveillance...

Many places, including the island of Oahu in Hawaii, have a number of groundwater aquifers. Consumers located in one aquifer area can be supplied from water extracted and transported from another aquifer if this results in cost savings over local extraction. Incorporating such interdistrict...

An emerging problem for environmental policy is how to design efficient strategies for the prevention and control of invasive species. However, the literature has mostly focused either on pre-introduction prevention or post-introduction control of an invasive. The benefits of prevention cannot...

Invasive species change ecosystems and the economic services such ecosystems provide. Optimal policy will minimize the expected damages and costs of prevention and control. We seek to explain policy outcomes as a function of biological and economic factors, using the case of Hawaii to...

Conserving the watershed can help to preserve the groundwater supplies by avoiding loss of recharge. Preventing overuse of available water through pricing reforms can also substantially increase benefits from groundwater stock. Since efficiency prices are generally higher than the inefficient,...

Proposals for marginal cost water pricing have often been found to be politically infeasible because current users will have to pay a higher price even though future users will be better off. We show how efficiency pricing can be rendered Pareto-improving, and thus politically feasible, by...

Several studies have documented that intertemporal water allocation in Hawaii (as elsewhere) is inefficient (see e.g., Moncur et. al., 1998). The result is widely expected to be early depletion of groundwater resources and the resulting need for using expensive and exotic technologies such as...