Description:
How to deal with environmental pollution and overuse of natural resources, like climate change, declining fish stocks or fossil fuel reserves? This course develops an economic perspective on the analysis of and ways to deal with external effects and intertemporal trade-offs – being the root of many public good and open access problems centered around emissions of pollutants and extraction of renewable or non-renewable resources. The course covers a now established literature stemming from an originally neoclassical approach to sustainability problems, and integrates it with complementary approaches, in particular from institutional economics (e.g. the work of Elinor Ostrom), and from systems science.
Participating students follow lectures and discuss topics in seminars on the basic theory, combined with method training in dynamic optimization, game theory and institutional analysis. They team-up in groups to conduct a study on governing a particular self-selected environmental or resource problem.
Literature (Core textbooks):
Perman, R., Y. Ma, J. McGilvray, and M. Common. Natural Resource and Environmental Economics. Various editions. Pearson.
Vatn, Arild. 2005. Institutions and the Environment. Edward Elgar.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Time & venue:
Mondays, 12:00-14:00; HU Berlin, Hannoversche Str. 27, House 12 (Campus Nord), room 1.03
Tuesdays, 14:00-16:00; HU Berlin, Hannoversche Str. 27, House 12 (Campus Nord), room 1.03
Exam:
tba
More information can be found on Moodle.
