INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

The course is designed to introduce students to a basic toolkit to analyse natural resources problems from an economist’s perspective. The focus will be on the integrated management of natural resources and environmental problems, and a preliminary background will be given on key concepts and metrics, such as sustainability, externalities and public goods.

Part 1: The standard theory of optimal natural resource use will be presented privileging economic intuitions rather than a mathematical exposition, with the help of three main applications: oil and stock pollutants, fisheries, forestry.

Part 2: Contrasting this standard approach, the course will broaden the institutional and policy dimensions of natural resource management by using a combination of game theory, case-study evidence and group presentations for several common pool resource problems. To illustrate the interlocked relationship between institutional development and natural resources, the paradox of the natural resource curse will be examined also with the support of specific case studies and group presentations.

Part 3: The final part of the course will use a very basic game theoretic framework to examine international negotiations on climate change and the international dimension of environmental problems more in general. The goal is to show how the dimension of environmental and natural resource problems affect the appropriate policy choice.

- basic knowledge of growth models with natural resources renewable and exhaustible
- refresh the knowledge of basic concepts of environmental economics with an application to dynamic problems of resources' use
- mastering game theory applied to natural resources' problems
- evaluation of environment-economic trade-offs in different contexts (e.g., types of resources)
- evaluation and applications of best practices and policies to the management of natural resources
- mastering problems of natural resource management at both the micro and macro level

Basic knowledge of ecology, economics, statistics

Environmental sustainability
Key concepts of environmental and resource economics
Theory of optimal natural resource use: non-renewable resources
Application: stock pollutants
Theory of optimal natural resource use: renewable resources
Application: fishery and, if time, forestry
Managing the commons in different institutional arrangements
The curse of natural resources and institutional quality
Global policies and climate change
Trade, competitiveness and environmental policies

Teaching materials (slides and further readings) made available by the instructor through the Moodle web platform

The final evaluation and grading is based upon a written test, covering all the topics of the class

Group presentation on specific topics will also count for 25% of the final grade

The course foresees a series of lectures making use of powerpoint presentations made available to students since the beginning of the course, group works and questions/answers (written or oral) to monitor learning progress

The blog functionality provided by the Moodle platform is used for on-line communication with students.

English

Course materials (powerpoint slides, homework, readings, etc.) can be found in the Ca' Foscari Moodle web site: http://moodle.unive.it/

written