Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach

Environmental Markets explains the prospects of using markets to improve environmental quality and resource conservation. No other book focuses on a property rights approach using environmental markets to solve environmental problems. This book compares standard approaches to these problems using governmental management, regulation, taxation, and subsidization with a market-based property rights approach. This approach is applied to land, water, wildlife, fisheries, and air and is compared to governmental solutions. The book concludes by discussing tougher environmental problems such as ocean fisheries and the global atmosphere, emphasizing that neither governmental nor market solutions are a panacea.
Environmental Markets is the inaugural book in Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society, a new interdisciplinary series of theoretical and empirical research focusing on individual choice, institutions, and social outcomes, edited by Peter J. Boettke and Timur Kuran.
Buy now at Cambridge University Press.
Reviews

Two of the world’s leading scholars on property rights and the environment offer a timely reminder that government is not always an effective steward of natural resources when markets fail at this task, and offer a rich review of the myriad creative ways in which market forces can be harnessed to improve environmental quality. The book’’s fresh perspective on the question of how best to solve problems ranging from climate change to overfishing reminds economists and their students to “look before they leap”, with regulation as a solution.

— Sheila M. Olmstead
University of Texas, Austin

Two of the economics profession’s leading lights logically demolish the fallacy that only government action can protect the environment. In its place, they build a rock-solid, readily understandable case for a property-rights–market-based alternative approach. Their wealth of experience shines through in the case-study evidence used to reinforce their arguments.

— Jeff Bennett
Australian National University

Environmental Markets reminds us to identify the root causes of environmental problems before prescribing solutions. Often it is not failing markets but missing markets that are the problem. The authors’ numerous examples are compelling. This book will serve as a guidepost for economists and other analysts proposing policy solutions to the difficult environmental problems we face today.

— Margaret Walls
Research Director and Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future

Terry Anderson

Terry L. Anderson is the former president and executive director of PERC, and the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Gary Libecap

Senior Fellow

Growing up in Livingston, Montana, Gary Libecap was deeply influenced by the landscape surrounding his small town. In time, his professional interests focused on topics interwoven into the fabric of western society. He explores problems based on shared resources through the framework of property rights. Libecap studies the way outside factors influence market transactions. He looks at the gains often available by internalizing solutions, or keeping the role of the state limited. In the area…

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