Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity: The State of the Debate

Jeffrey Krautkraemer

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Whether economic growth can be sustained in a finite natural world is one of the earliest and most enduring questions in economic literature. Even with unprecedented growth in human population and resource consumption, humans have been quite adept at finding solutions to the problem of scarce natural resources, particularly in response to signals of increased scarcity. Because environmental resources generally are not generally traded on markets, however, scarcity signals for these resources may be inadequate, and appropriate policy responses are difficult to implement and manage. In the debate over the economic scarcity of natural resources, one significant change in recent years has been a greater focus on the ecosystem services and the resource amenities yielded by natural environments. The general conclusion of this paper is that technological progress has ameliorated the scarcity of natural resource commodities; but resource amenities have become more scarce, and it is unlikely that technology alone can remedy that.

Keywords: natural; resource; scarcity.; environmental; amenities.; resource; substitution. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q01 Q10 Q20 Q30 Q40 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-04-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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