IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rff/dpaper/dp-04-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Scarcity and Growth in the New Millennium: Summary

Author

Listed:
  • Toman, Michael
  • Simpson, R. David
  • Ayres, Robert

Abstract

In their 1963 classic Scarcity and Growth Howard Barnett and Chandler Morse argued that resource scarcity did not threaten economic growth. A second investigation in the late 1970s, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, reached largely the same conclusion. The 25 years since that work was published have witnessed many developments. The message of Scarcity and Growth that depletion of market resources was not a problem has given way to a concern that “new scarcities” of environmental quality, global climate, and biological diversity are emerging. Resources for the Future recently assembled a distinguished group of international scholars to again address scarcity and growth. This paper describes their charge and summarizes their findings. Technological progress may hold the key to overcoming the scarcity of environmental resources. Market forces may not be enough to motivate the required innovations, which must instead be social and institutional as well as technical and will be constrained by interlinking complexities.

Suggested Citation

  • Toman, Michael & Simpson, R. David & Ayres, Robert, 2004. "Scarcity and Growth in the New Millennium: Summary," RFF Working Paper Series dp-04-01, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-04-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-04-01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1974. "Growth with Exhaustible Natural Resources: The Competitive Economy," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(5), pages 139-152.
    2. Lomborg,Bjørn, 2001. "The Skeptical Environmentalist," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521010689.
    3. Gene M. Grossman & Alan B. Krueger, 1995. "Economic Growth and the Environment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(2), pages 353-377.
    4. Dixit, Avinash K & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1977. "Monopolistic Competition and Optimum Product Diversity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 67(3), pages 297-308, June.
    5. Nordhaus, William D, 1974. "Resources as a Constraint on Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(2), pages 22-26, May.
    6. D. Gale Johnson, 2000. "Population, Food, and Knowledge," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 1-14, March.
    7. Heal, Geoffrey M., 1993. "The optimal use of exhaustible resources," Handbook of Natural Resource and Energy Economics, in: A. V. Kneese† & J. L. Sweeney (ed.), Handbook of Natural Resource and Energy Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 18, pages 855-880, Elsevier.
    8. R. M. Solow, 1974. "Intergenerational Equity and Exhaustible Resources," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(5), pages 29-45.
    9. Harold Hotelling, 1931. "The Economics of Exhaustible Resources," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 39(2), pages 137-137.
    10. Joseph Stiglitz, 1974. "Growth with Exhaustible Natural Resources: Efficient and Optimal Growth Paths," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(5), pages 123-137.
    11. Lant Pritchett, 1997. "Divergence, Big Time," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(3), pages 3-17, Summer.
    12. J. M. Clark, 1923. "Overhead Costs in Modern Industry," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 31(5), pages 606-606.
    13. Martin L. Weitzman, 1976. "On the Welfare Significance of National Product in a Dynamic Economy," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 90(1), pages 156-162.
    14. Moses Abramovitz, 1956. "Resource and Output Trends in the United States since 1870," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number abra56-1.
    15. Partha Dasgupta & Geoffrey Heal, 1974. "The Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(5), pages 3-28.
    16. Moses Abramovitz, 1956. "Resource and Output Trends in the United States since 1870," NBER Chapters, in: Resource and Output Trends in the United States since 1870, pages 1-23, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John E. Wagner & David H. Newman, 2013. "The Simon-Ehrlich Bet: Teaching Relative Vs. Absolute Scarcity," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 58(1), pages 16-26, May.
    2. Ockwell, David G., 2008. "Energy and economic growth: Grounding our understanding in physical reality," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(12), pages 4600-4604, December.
    3. Wagner, Jeffrey, 2006. "On the economics of sustainability," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(4), pages 659-664, June.
    4. Stefano Bartolini & Luigi Bonatti, 2004. "Does Technical Progress Increase Long-Run Welfare?," Department of Economics University of Siena 435, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
    5. Muller, Adrian, 2006. "Sustainable Agriculture and the Production of Biomass for Energy Use," Working Papers in Economics 216, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics, revised 01 Aug 2008.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nick Hanley & Louis Dupuy & Eoin McLaughlin, 2015. "Genuine Savings And Sustainability," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 779-806, September.
    2. Cameron Hepburn & Alex Bowen, 2013. "Prosperity with growth: economic growth, climate change and environmental limits," Chapters, in: Roger Fouquet (ed.), Handbook on Energy and Climate Change, chapter 29, pages 617-638, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. V.Martinet & L. Doyen, 2003. "Sustainable management of an exhaustible resource:a viable control model," THEMA Working Papers 2003-36, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    4. Renaud Coulomb & Oskar Lecuyer & Adrien Vogt-Schilb, 2019. "Optimal Transition from Coal to Gas and Renewable Power Under Capacity Constraints and Adjustment Costs," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 73(2), pages 557-590, June.
    5. Sasaki, Hiroaki & Mino, Kazuo, 2024. "Effects of exhaustible resources and declining population on economic growth with Hotelling’s rule," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    6. Pezzey, John C.V., 2004. "Exact measures of income in a hyperbolic economy," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(4), pages 473-484, August.
    7. Burcu Afyonoğlu Fazlıoğlu & Agustín Pérez-Barahona & Çağrı Sağlam, 2019. "Energy and Physical Capital: A Case of Non-classical Dynamics," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 72(4), pages 1003-1022, April.
    8. Antony, Jürgen & Klarl, Torben, 2023. "Subsistence consumption and natural resource depletion: Can resource-rich low-income countries realize sustainable consumption paths?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    9. McGrath, Luke & Hynes, Stephen & McHale, John, 2019. "Augmenting the World Bank's estimates: Ireland's genuine savings through boom and bust," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 1-1.
    10. Bretschger, Lucas, 2005. "Economics of technological change and the natural environment: How effective are innovations as a remedy for resource scarcity?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(2-3), pages 148-163, August.
    11. Luke McGrath & Stephen Hynes & John McHale, 2020. "Linking Sustainable Development Assessment in Ireland and the European Union with Economic Theory," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 51(2), pages 327-355.
    12. Bazhanov, Andrei, 2008. "Maximin-optimal sustainable growth with nonrenewable resource and externalities," MPRA Paper 9510, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 02 Jul 2008.
    13. Asheim, Geir B. & Hartwick, John M. & Mitra, Tapan, 2021. "Investment rules and time invariance under population growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    14. Ricker, Martin, 1997. "Limits to economic growth as shown by a computable general equilibrium model," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 141-158, May.
    15. Pommeret, Aude & Ricci, Francesco & Schubert, Katheline, 2022. "Critical raw materials for the energy transition," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    16. Sjak Smulders & Michael Toman & Cees Withagen, 2014. "Growth Theory and “Green Growthâ€," OxCarre Working Papers 135, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
    17. Ronald H. Schmidt, 1988. "Hotelling's rule repealed? An examination of exhaustible resource pricing," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Fall, pages 41-54.
    18. Hassler, John & Krusell, Per & Olovsson, Conny, 2022. "Finite resources and the world economy," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    19. Johnson Kakeu, 2016. "Exhaustibility and Risk as Asset Class Dimensions: A Social Investor Approach to Capital-Resource Economies," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 65(4), pages 677-695, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    history of economic thought; technological change; renewable resources and economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B12 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Classical (includes Adam Smith)
    • B20 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - General
    • N50 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • Q20 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - General
    • Q32 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-04-01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Resources for the Future (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rffffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.