Natural Resource Economics: Notes and Problems

In this book, Jon Conrad and Colin Clark develop the theory of resource economics. To begin, they provide an introduction to the required techniques of dynamic optimization. Throughout the book they build the reader's understanding with many fully-worked problems and numerical examples. The authors have written this text in the belief that the theory and concepts of resource are more quickly learned, more effectively made operational, and more truly understood if the reader is exposed to carefully explained numerical examples. By working through the problems at the end of each chapter, students will learn the techniques to be used in empirical studies of natural resource systems. The first chapter provides an introduction to optimization, including constrained optimization, dynamic allocation problems, dynamic programming, continuous time problems, and the maximum principle, and a discussion of various numerical and graphical techniques. The remaining chapters deal in depth with the economics of renewable resources, nonrenewable resources, with environmental management and with stochastic resource models.