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Essays in the economics of renewable resource management and international trade

University of British Columbia

The broad objectives of a natural resources management program include economic efficiency, biological sustainability and social equity. While the first is conceptually uncontentious, the last two often pose challenges by bringing in as implicit stakeholders the general public community and the future generations. The 'commons' problem in renewable resource exploitation is often combined in real life with several types of additional externalities, such as cross-sectoral domestic spillover effects in a diversified economy, or transboundary effects due to overexploitation. Moreover, the distributional implications and local scarcity favoured by corrupt resource policies are prone to create social tensions, extensively documented in the literature. The main object of this thesis is the study of some of these effects in closed and open economy settings. The first chapter uses a political economy framework to analyze the link between natural resources and conflict, where an inefficient and corrupt natural resource management is skewed to favour certain groups in society to the detriment of others. The second chapter uses this theory to provide empirical evidence for the importance of resource depletion and corruption as determinants of civil conflicts. The third chapter deals with the transboundary effects posed by open-access exploitation and trade with a mobile resource which disperses between two jurisdictions. The fourth chapter focuses on the interaction between open-access resource harvesting and industrial pollution, as it considers the welfare effects of international trade.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8443

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/