Public Goods, Efficiency and Environmental Statistics

According to the announcement for this conference the general subject area of this paper is ‘Environmental Policy and Public Goods’. The term ‘public good’ is, of course, not a synonym for ‘public welfare’, but rather an antonym for ‘private good’. And what is a ‘good’? In the sometimes peculiar jargon of economics, the word connotes nothing of inherent virtue: basically, a ‘good’ is anything tangible that conveys a ‘service’ to a ‘consumer’. A consumer, by the way, does not physically ‘consume’ anything except air, drinking water and food. For the rest, consumption is essentially a process of exhausting the utility of goods by extracting services from them. The material object, itself, is discarded.