We study Ramsey second-best optimal policy in a general equilibrium model of growth with renewable natural resources. Natural resources are depleted by private economic activity, but they can also be maintained by public policy. The government uses distorting taxes to finance infrastructure...

In this chapter both theory and empirics are used to show that our picture of the processes of economic development changes radically when nature is introduced as a capital asset. Particular features of institutions that fashion societies' use of the natural-resource base are identified and...

Multifactor productivity is a comprehensive measure of productivity where the underlying production function accounts for multiple factor inputs, traditionally labour and produced capital. While single-factor productivity is intuitively simple, such measure offers a biased picture of the economy...

In the natural-resource literature, conventional wisdom holds that weak property rights will cause a resource to be over-exploited. This is because weak property rights are typically perceived as a problem of input exclusion – or theft of un-extracted resources. We present evidence to the...

We examine the efficiency, distributional, and environmental consequences of assigning spatial property rights to part of a spatially-connected natural resource while the remainder is competed for by an open access fringe. We refer to this as partial enclosure of the commons. We obtain sharp...

We examine the efficiency, distributional, and environmental consequences of assigning spatial property rights to part of a spatially-connected natural resource while the remainder is competed for by an open access fringe. We refer to this as partial enclosure of the commons. We obtain sharp...