Suchergebnisse

Many environmental damages are caused by substances which come into existence as undesired joint outputs in the production of desired goods. Whether an output is desired or not, however, is not an inherent property of the substance itself but depends on the context of production. This book studies the role of a potential ambivalence of joint outputs for the description and analysis of dynamic economy-environment interactions and for the design of efficient environmental policy. This is done in an interisciplinary way: methods and insights from thermodynamics, engineering sciences, economics and the methodology of economics are combined in order to develop an encompassing view on the complex and multivarious phenomenon of ambivalent joint production. By using the concept of joint production as a unifying framework for describing and analyzing the relations between human economic activity and the surrounding natural environment this book contributes to a critical and constructive assessment of the traditional environmental economic approach

Most, if not all, environmental problems of our time have their origin in human economic activity. In order to better understand how environmental problems arise from economic activity and how they may be solved in a sustainable manner, one needs to combine scientific expertise from the natural sciences and from economics. For, it is the domain of the natural sciences to analyze nature', while economics studies the economy'. In this study, I contribute to this interdisciplinary task in a threefold manner: (i) In Part I, I employ concepts and methods from thermodynamics in order to study how this natural science puts constraints on the transformation of energy and matter in the economic process of production. (ii) In Part II, I analyze the problem of biodiversity loss and conservation by combining concepts and methods from ecology and economics to study coupled ecological-economic systems. (iii) An underlying interest throughout this study is the methodological question of how to integrate concepts and methods from the natural sciences, such as thermodynamics or ecology, and the social sciences, such as economics. The approaches in Parts I and II are complementary in that they follow different methodological approaches to interdisciplinary integration of natural science constraints into environmental and resource economics - method-orientation and problem-orientation, respectively.

Many environmental damages are caused by substances which come into existence asundesired joint outputs in the production of desired goods. Whether an output isdesired or not, however, is not an inherent property of the substance itself butdepends on the context of production. This book studies in an interdisciplinary way the role of the potential ambivalence of joint outputs for the description and analysis of dynamic economy-environment interactions and for the design of environmental policy. Keywords: Joint Production, Enviromental Policy, Thermodynamics Contents: Introduction.- The Phenomenon of Joint Production: Joint Production and the Natural Environment.- Thermodynamics.- All Production is Joint Production.- The Analysis of Joint Production in the History of Economic Thought: The Classical Position and its Early Critics.- The Abandonment of Classical Theory.- Neoclassical Theory from Partial to General Equilibrium Analysis.- The Role of Joint Production for the Construction of Economic Theory.- The Economics of Ambivalent Joint Production: The Concept of Joint Production.- Ambivalence of Joint Products.- Joint Productsand Irreversibility.- Non-Convexity of the Production Set.- Ambivalent Joint Production: Putting the Issue in Perspective.