Q00 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics: GeneralNávrat zpět

The paper shows the current state of environmental concerns in economic theory. Different economic schools have incorporated the environmental analysis into their theoretical framework. They use different presumptions, focus on different environmental aspects and come to diverse conclusions and political recommendations. However, there are many unclear frontiers between one another. This paper would like to help to understand these differences. It characterises and compares the main economic schools and theories. The paper focuses on environmental economics, ecological economics, new institutional economics, free market environmentalism, coevolutionary theory in economics and bioeconomics.

This paper reviews important approaches to discounting in economic modelling. It summarizes historical approaches and discusses why exponential discounting has been adopted as a widely accepted benchmark. The article then presents hyperbolic discounting as an alternative, while stresses different interpretation of discounting in positive and normative economics. In positive economics, the paper uses recent evidence to show that some observed regularities implied by exponential discounting are counterfactual and we illustrate different implications of the two approaches to discounting using numerical simulations of a stylized model of investment-consump- tion behaviour. It also concerns with applications of discounting in normative models of environmental economics. Many authors claim that exponential discounting, when used for long-term project evaluation, leads to an unfair treatment with generations living in a far future. We construct a model of optimal non-renewable resource exploitation to illustrate different normative implications of exponential and hyperbolic discounting.