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Several senior natural resource analysts study the role played by innovation, particularly technological innovation, in the pursuit of heightened productivity. Increasing the output of a given input improves a firm?s bottom line, makes it more competitive internationally, and reduces the potential for resource depletion and shortages. Thus, high productivity is a necessary ingredient of economic prosperity. This book illustrates the importance of technological innovation in achieving an acceptable level of output and efficiency.In this important new offering, a team of resource scholars descri

Abstract:It has occasionally been asserted that regulators typically overestimate the costs of the regulations they impose. A number of arguments have been proposed for why this might be the case. The most widely credited is that regulators fail sufficiently to appreciate the effects of innovation in reducing regulatory compliance costs. Most existing studies have found that regulators are more likely to over- than to underestimate costs. While it is difficult to develop summary statistics to aggregate the results of different studies of disparate industries, one such measure is the average of the ratio of ex ante estimates of compliance costs to ex post estimates of the same costs. This ratio is generally greater than one. In this paper I argue that neither the greater frequency of overestimates nor the fact that the average ratio of ex ante to ex post cost estimates is greater than one necessarily demonstrates that ex ante estimates are biased. There are several reasons to suppose that the distribution of compliance costs could be skewed, so that the median of the distribution would lie below the mean. It is not surprising, then, that most estimates would prove to be too high. Moreover, Jensen's inequality implies that the expected ratio of ex ante to ex post compliance costs would be greater than one. I propose a regression-based test of the bias of ex ante compliance cost estimates, and cannot reject the hypothesis that estimates are unbiased. Failure to reject a hypothesis with limited and noisy data should not, of course, be interpreted as a strong argument to accept the hypothesis. Rather, this paper argues for the generation of more and better information. Despite the existence of a number of papers reporting ex ante and ex post compliance cost estimates, it is surprisingly difficult to get a large sample with which to make such comparisons.

ABSTRACTA number of international conservation donors support efforts to encourage conservation indirectly by subsidizing commercial activities. Such plans beg two questions. First, if commercial ventures are expected to be profitable, why is external financing necessary for their initiation? Second, if commercial ventures are not expected to be profitable, could not greater incentives for conservation be generated by making direct payments? We examine these questions in detail. While we find that the practical impediments to instituting a direct payment programme may be substantial, the practical impediments to instituting any effective conservation programme may be substantial. On balance, there is a strong case to be made for greater experimentation with direct payment schemes than heretofore.

Living organisms produce chemicals for repelling pests and resisting infections. Some of these chemicals have considerable commercial value. The demonstration of commercial value might motivate increased conservation of tropical biodiversity. Successful commercialization requires countries with genetic resources either to transfer these resources to foreign research organizations that can develop them or to acquire the capacity to develop them commercially. This paper discusses factors in contracting for such transfers and investing in such capacity.

This innovative book examines a problem of growing concern and importance: obtaining accurate estimates of the ecological costs of human activities. The book covers a wide range of subjects, from the management and function of ecosystems to ecological issues affecting public policy. It focuses on the trade-offs inherent in environmental and conservation policy. Ecosystems provide resources that can be extracted and are valued in the market place, but the delivery of those resources depends on the functioning of natural processes whose maintenance may involve substantial costs

International conservation investments are often made in the form of subsidies to purportedly eco-friendly enterprises rather than as payments conditional on habitat protection. Previous research demonstrated that direct payments for habitat protection are more cost effective than indirect subsidies for the acquisition of com-plementary inputs used in eco-friendly enterprises. In contrast to this earlier research, we assume in this paper that an 'eco-entrepreneur' may have market power. Market power is shown to compound the advantage of direct payments. Through a simple numerical example, we show that subsidies intended to achieve habitat conservation by encouraging the acquisition of complementary inputs can be spectacularly inefficient. In some cases it would be cheaper simply to buy the land outright. In other plausible cases, the indirect subsidy approach would simply be unable to achieve habitat conservation objectives no matter how much funding were available.