Renewable resources, property-rights regimes and endogenous growth [An article from: Ecological Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from Ecological Economics, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We extend Brander and Taylor's [Brander, J.A., Taylor, M.S., 1998. The simple economics of Easter Island: a Ricardo-Malthus model of renewable resource use. Am. Econ. Rev. 88, 119-138.] model of feast and famine cycles on Easter Island using Galor and Weil's [Gailor, O., Weil, D.N., 2000. Population, technology and growth: from Malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond, Am. Econ. Rev. 90, 806-28] model of endogenous technological advance, where technological change is related to the population. We note that different property-rights regimes will influence the relative direction of technological advance-whether that advance is in harvesting technologies or in technologies that influence the growth rate of some renewable biological resource. Property-rights regimes that favor biological growth rates over harvest rates tend to dampen feast-famine cycles, while those that favor harvest efficiency worsen such cycles.