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I wish to consider how industries exploiting natural resources may be expected to develop. It is not my purpose to consider their entire relation with the economy of which they form a part. Rather, I wish to examine the logic of their own changes in technology and technique in response to stimuli from the rest of the economy. In tracing this development, I shall stress the changing technology itself; the adjustment of property and tenure concepts; some aspects of location and transportation; and the impact of all these changes on industrial and market organization.As an analytical technique for tracing these changes, I shall make use of a "stages of development" approach. It will be shown that most industries working natural resources may be said to be in one of three, roughly consecutive stages. The precise dating of the transitions between the stages is highly arbitrary, but this defect is unimportant since the chief function of the stages approach in its present context is to bring out the successive impacts on resource exploitation of two outside forces. The first of these is a mechanical, capital-using technology. The second is the application of science to "control" the resource, biological or mineral, in the same sense that agricultural and manufacturing industries have control over their processes.In the model, stress is laid on the industries that today are still extracting raw materials from nature: fishing, hunting, logging, oil and gas, metals, and water. Agricultural activity also properly belongs with these industries. However, since agriculture has already passed well into the third stage, it is referred to chiefly for purposes of example and comparison. The farmer no longer "hunts" his cattle, nor "collects" wild rice or fruit.

The first report of the Borden Commission appeared in October, 1958. It dealt with the transmission, export and regulation of natural gas, and with the financing of Trans-Canada Pipe Lines Limited. Very little was said about the transportation and export of crude oil. This second report is designed to fill the gap. It deals with "the policies which the Commission believes will best serve the national interest in relation to the export of crude oil and the marketing of crude oil within Canada itself."On the model of their first report, the Commissioners start out by comparing reserves and potential output with future Canadian needs. But while they could regard natural gas as a limited stock of energy avidly desired by the United States market, they soon found that Canadian crude, like Canadian coal, had become excessively abundant. The United States and the rest of the world were so far from scheming to get hold of Canadian crude oil that they might even have been relieved if Canada had never found it. Even while the Commission sat, the situation deteriorated further. Those who sought approval of Canada's recently gained export markets along the Transprovincial pipeline in the American middle west, and in the Puget Sound area on the west coast, were replaced by those pleading for new Canadian markets to replace a falling export demand.

The subject of this paper is the economic analysis of the alienation of natural resources, by which is meant not only the disposal of a resource by outright sale but also the disposal of rights, perhaps for a limited period, to exploit, perhaps in a limited fashion, one or more of the natural resources of a specified area. In order to illustrate current procedures and their trends, I begin by describing very briefly the methods by which enterprises obtain rights from the province of British Columbia to exploit resources. (Readers interested only in analysis may wish to skip this first section.) In the next sections I discuss the contribution economic theory can make to an appraisal of methods of alienation; then, in the light of this discussion, I suggest a few desiderata in policy.Since provinces are fairly free to make their own policies on alienation, procedures differ from region to region. Before the procedures followed in British Columbia are outlined, it should be emphasized that the more complete and absolute alienation to private ownership, the more the rights of the province shrink to the regulation of industry, collection of taxes, and other general powers enumerated in the British North America Act. It should also be kept in mind that the administration of natural gas and petroleum carried across provincial boundaries, of fisheries, and of rivers that cross the international boundary may be affected by both federal and American regulations and laws.Agricultural land. Some land is alienated by pre-emption but in most cases it is sold on a first-come-first-served basis after survey and some development work by the government. On alienation, the land generally passes into private ownership, though mineral and water rights are reserved.Fisheries. Anyone may fish, on conditions imposed mainly by the federal government.

Conservation is a word which occurs more and more frequently in politics. The "conservation of natural resources" appears both in the government accounts and in election speeches as a phrase which covers public spending on forests, waters, minerals, and fisheries, regardless of the ultimate purpose of that expenditure. Payments to American farmers, which enable them to achieve higher output and receive larger incomes, are blithely described as "conservation" without reference to whether or not the transaction has increased the nation's stock of natural resources.Conservation is a field of study for many of the sciences. Originally, I think I may say, the child of the forestry profession (indeed in the United States the profession of forestry might almost be described as the child of the conservation movement), it has received increasing attention from many other fields. In the 1920's, conservation of oil resources became the slogan of the petroleum companies, swamped by new discoveries. They lost interest when demand increased relative to the newly controlled supply. In the 1930's, low demand for farm output, grave drought conditions, and allegedly increasing soil erosion made "conservation" a good cry for those who would give aid to agriculture. During the last war, farm specialists pushing soil conservation continued to hold the stage, but since then the public has heard increasingly from scientists and business men connected with fisheries, petroleum, water power, forestry, and even minerals. The current approach is to discuss the interrelation of the use of all the natural resources and to stress the necessity of conserving such resources simultaneously.

A study of ";economic imperialism"; based on a theoretical inquiry into the most important research frontier in the scholarly field: the analysis of constitutions. The book evaluates constitutional arrangements by the degree to which they economize on the scarcity of resources available in any society, demonstrating a preference for constitutions that make governments efficient.