1975 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
Economic Aspects of Natural Resource Depletion
verfasst von : Geoffrey Heal
Erschienen in: The Economics of Natural Resource Depletion
Verlag: Macmillan Education UK
Enthalten in: Professional Book Archive
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If one asks the question ‘Will a market mechanism lead to a sensible allocation of exhaustible resources over time?’ — and this seems a very pertinent question to ask in the present context — then in economic terms one is asking whether there are any reasons to suppose that examples of market failure are important in this field. Presumably the most clear-cut example of a market failure is a total absence of the appropriate market, and there are two general categories of market which in an ideal Arrow-Debreu world would play an important role in securing an efficient allocation of resources over time, yet which in practice are notable largely for their paucity. The categories concerned are clearly forward markets and contingent commodity or risk markets. Forward markets are of importance because the essence of the problem is that it involves allocating a fixed and unaugmentable stock between competing uses at different points of time: we are much more concerned about the allocation of oil resources between current uses and those a decade hence than we would be about the allocation of cars between such uses, because we know that in ten years’ time we can always make more cars if it seems worth while.