Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling is an attempt to use general equilibrium theory as a tool for analysis of resource allocation and income distribution issues in market economies. Since the beginning of the 1990s, CGE modeling has been widely used for analysis of environmental policy...

In this chapter, we review the concept of national income and the economic theory of national income accounting. There are two building blocks - the ideas of Fisher, Lindahl, Hicks about income as an expenditure level that can be continued into the future, and the concept of income as a welfare...

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the reasons for collective action failures and successes in natural resource management, and to understand, in the light of economic theory, the mode of operation of the factors involved whenever possible. In the first section, we clarify the notion of...

We argue that when externalities such as pollution are nonexcludable, agents must be compelled to participate in a "mechanism" to ensure a Pareto-efficient outcome. We survey some of the main findings of the mechanism-design (implementation-theory) literature -- such as the Nash implementation...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter focuses exclusively on the second component, the means -- the "instruments" -- of environmental policy, and considers, in particular, experience around the world with the...

The conservation of biodiversity is a major environmental issue, one that promises to remain at or near the top of the environmental agenda for the foreseeable future. The loss of biodiversity affects human welfare as well as being lamentable for its own sake. Humans depend on natural systems to...

This chapter provides a review and assessment of the extensive literature on the political determination of environmental regulation. A promising theoretical literature has emerged relatively recently that provides models of the political interaction of government with various interest groups in...

This chapter studies the interface in poor countries of population growth, rural poverty, and deterioration of the local natural-resource base, a subject that has been much neglected by modern demographers and development economists. The motivations for procreation in rural communities of the...

Economics has played an increasingly important role in shaping policy, in the United States and elsewhere. This chapter reviews some of the dimensions of the economic approach to analyzing, understanding, and developing solutions to the problem of climate change. We then turn to the issue of...

One of the only places where environmental quality is traded on explicit markets is real estate. There are several techniques that can be used to study the effects of environmental quality on property values and infer willingness to pay for improvements. The most commonly used method is the...