The Productivity Commission released its final research report into ‘Rural Water Use and the Environment: The Role of Market Mechanisms’ in August 2006. The report indicates that there is scope for markets to play a greater role in improving the efficient use of water, including for...

This paper examines the environmental effects of mineral taxes in a framework that recognizes the importance of rates and cumulative externalities and proposes an appropriate corrective tax. It concludes that mineral resources taxation should combine neutral taxes with a dynamic Pigovian type...

We analyze the general-equilibrium e§ects of alternative regimes of access rights over renewable natural resources ñnamely, open access versus full property rights ñon the pace of development when economic growth is endogenously driven by both horizontal and vertical innovations. Resource...

In this paper an endogenous growth model is analyzed which takes account of environmental deterioration and abatement. The environment plays a role both in production and welfare. It is common practice to solve growth models by looking at a balanced growth solution, which is often associated...

Conflicts between optimality and sustainability are typical in the literature on sustainable development. Using the 'capital-resource' growth model, Pezzey and Withagen (1998) have proved that if natural resources are exhaustible, the time-path of consumption is single-peaked, declining from...

This article provides two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development, and characterises the welfare criterion that they imply. It presents a formal theory of sustainable development, created by the author (Chichilnisky, 1996a, 1997). The axioms require that neither the present nor...

We imbed a classic fishery model, where the optimal policy follows a Most Rapid Approach Path to a steady state, into an overlapping generations setting. The current generation discounts future generations’ utility flows at a rate possibly different from the pure rate of time preference used...

We analyze the general-equilibrium effects of alternative regimes of access rights over renewable natural resources – namely, open access versus full property rights on the pace of development when economic growth is endogenously driven by both horizontal and vertical innovations. Resource...

This paper promotes the idea of Rights for Future Generations as one of the ethical principles on which politics, economics and justice in the 21st century should be based. It argues that environmental damage caused by current generations has already impaired the ability of future generations to...