ENVI 386
Environmental Policy and Natural Resource Management Spring 2013
Division II Quantitative/Formal Reasoning
Cross-listed ECON 518 / ECON 386
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Policymakers in developed and developing countries struggle to manage natural resources and to protect the environment from excessive degradation while attending to pressing human needs. Economics has a rich body of advice to help achieve these goals. In this course, we will study environmental policy and natural resource management from a microeconomic (and, to a lesser extent, macroeconomic) perspective. We will explore relevant economic theory, look for empirical evidence in scholarly studies, and study actual policies as they have been implemented. The course is undergirded by concepts like sustainability, welfare within and across generations, market failure, and valuation of environmental assets. We will continually emphasize issues of efficiency and equity. Again and again we will see that the challenges are both technical and ethical, as society is forced to make troubling tradeoffs. Topics in the class will include pollution (with a focus on climate change and on incentive-based policies like tax and “cap-and-trade”), management of nonrenewable and renewable resources (including resources like oil, forests, and fisheries), and energy (with its obvious links to resource use and climate change). We will also examine the relationship between development and the environment, touching on controversial topics such as the “natural resources curse” and the relationship between economic growth and the demand for environmental quality.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 25
Expected: 20
Class#: 3441
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: problem sets, paper, brief presentation, a midterm, and a final exam
Prerequisites: Economics 251, familiarity with statistics
Enrollment Preferences: senior Economic majors and CDE masters
Unit Notes: this course satisfies the Environmental Policy requirement for the Environmental Policy major and the Environmental studies concentration
Distributions: Division II Quantitative/Formal Reasoning
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ECON 518 Division II ENVI 386 Division II ECON 386 Division II
Attributes: ENVI Environmental Policy
ENVP Political Economy Electives
ENVP Environmental Policy Courses
MAST Interdepartmental Electives
POEC Comparative POEC/Public Policy Courses

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