Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics: An Overview

Natural resource economics has been the subject of serious academic inquiry for the past seven decades. Although it is difficult to trace its intellectual antecedents precisely, it is probably fair to say that it dates back to the early 1930s. The year 1931 has a special significance in the annals of natural resource economics; it was in that year that Harold Hotelling published his path-breaking paper on the economics of exhaustible resources in the Journal of Political Economy (Chapter 11 in this book), an event that has left a lasting imprint on the direction and development of the body of knowledge that is known today as the discipline of natural resource economics.