The last few years have witnessed important advances in our understanding of time preference and social discounting. In particular, several rationales for the use of time-varying social discount rates have emerged. These rationales range from the ad hoc to the formal, with some founded solely in...

Discussions about applied Cost Benefit Analysis are incomplete without the thorny issue of discounting emerging at some point. Indeed, since the calculation of Net Present Values (NPV), and hence the efficiency of a project or policy, hinges so crucially upon the level of the discount rate...

One of the most controversial areas of economics is the practice of discounting: attaching a lower weight to future costs and benefits than present costs and benefits. Discounting appears to offend notions of sustainable development and the interests of future generations. Recent advances in the...

This paper reviews the arguments for and the implications of employing Declining Discount Rates (DDRs) in CBA and in the analysis of economic growth and sustainability. We show that there exist several growth models in which a relationship has been found between the long-run equilibrium under...

The scarcity of water resources in both arid and temperate countries alike is one of the most pervasive natural resource allocation problems facing water users and policy-makers. In arid countries this problem is faced each day in the myriad of conflicts that surround its use.Water scarcity is a...

In this chapter a �watershed economics approach� that could be applied in Cyprus is proposed which is composed of two important stages. In Stage I economic valuation techniques are used to establish the economic value of the competing demands...