The economics of nature: Managing biological assets

摘要

This is an ambitious book. A review on the jacket states that 'There are presently no texts that are as inclusive and simultaneously as advanced as this one'. I tend to agree; in comparison, other texts seem either superficial or narrow. The authors indicate that the book is designed for upper level undergraduates and post-graduates but undergraduates would have to be very well trained and also very motivated. While the authors make extensive use of graphs, the mathematics is at a fairly high level. The fact that they cite original sources, both the seminal literature as well as more recent contributions, makes it particularly useful as a text for post-graduates and a reference book for the rest of us. The authors also present critiques of the methods and underlying assumptions of natural resource economics. Perspectives from ecology and ecological economics are addressed throughout the text rather than being relegated to a separate chapter. The focus is on natural resource policy and the tools are developed as a means to analyse policy. In line with this focus, the authors integrate natural resource economics concepts and ideas with welfare economics by beginning the book with two chapters that summarise welfare economics concepts, This tight linkage is appropriate and is usually not addressed in natural resource textbooks. These chapters are followed by chapters on resource rents, valuation of non-market goods, and cost benefit analysis. This section could have been improved by placing the valuation chapter after the CBA chapter and including a chapter on market failure. While they may (perhaps rightly) assume that all the readers are familiar with market failure concepts, it does reduce the usefulness of the book as a stand-alone graduate text since this is such a key issue in natural resource economics. Throughout the text, the authors discuss property rights issues, therefore a more in-depth treatment of property rights, perhaps even a whole chapter, would have been very helpful.