A significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions will require development of new technologies if such reductions are to be achieved without excessive costs. An important question is whether an agreement of the Kyoto type, which does not include elements related to research and...

Individuals with a preference for keeping moral obligations may dislike learning that voluntary contributions are socially valuable: Such informa- tion can trigger unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance. I show that if initial beliefs about the social value of contributions are sufficiently...

Norway is often referred to as the prime example of a country that has achieved high growth and low income inequality despite its vast natural resources. This contrasts sharply with many other resource abundant countries, which raises the questions why Norway has succeeded while many other...

The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indefinitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the...

This lecture discusses relationships between environmental and resource qualities and loads, and economic development, theoretically and empirically. We start in section 2 with a list of theoretical arguments that may or may not justify a tendency for environmental quality to first deteriorate,...

In the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion we show the following equivalence: If an efficient path has constant (gross and net of population growth) savings rates, then population growth must be quasi-arithmetic and the path is a maximin or a...

We show that our general result (Withagen and Asheim [8]) on the converse of Hartwick’s rule also applies for the special case of Solow’s model with one capital good and one exhaustible resource. Hence, the criticism by Cairns and Yang [1] of our paper is unfounded.

The bulk of acid depositions, which have harmful effects on the environment, are caused by foreign emissions in many European countries. Therefore, if some countries emit more acids, one cannot be sure that countries that emit less will benefit from reduced acid depositions. However, numerical...