IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cvs/starer/85-29.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Possibility of Continuing Expansion of Finite Resources

Author

Listed:
  • Baumol, William J.

Abstract

Because technological change increases the efficiency of the extraction and use of natural resources it is shown that, despite the accelerated use of the world's finite resources since the Industrial Revolution, it is very possible that their effective remaining supply, measured in terms of the services they are still capable of providing in the future, is greater today than it was, say, two centuries earlier. In this paper it is shown that, paradoxically, measured in terms of their prospective contributions to human welfare, the available quantity of the world's exhaustible resources may rise forever, year after year. However, even though they may never approach disappearance, the consumption of their services will eventually have to decline and, ultimately, approach zero asymptotically. Technische Veränderungen erhöhen die Effizienz der Gewinnung und Verwendung natürlicher Ressourcen. Deshalb ist es sehr wahrscheinlich, dass trotz dem beschleunigten Verbrauch der weltweit endlichen Ressourcen der von ihnen gestiftete Nutzen in Zukunft grösser sein wird als zum Beispiel vor zweihundert Jahren. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz wird nun aufgezeigt, dass paradoxerweise auch der Beitrag der natürlichen Ressourcen an die menschliche Wohlfahrt von Jahr zu Jahr ansteigt, auch wenn der Konsum der natürlichen Ressourcen sinken und assymptotisch gegen Null streben wird. Le changement technologique accroit l'efficacité de I'extraction et de l'utilisation des ressources naturelles. Malgre l'emploi croissant des ressources finies mondiales depuis la révolution industrielle, cet article montre qu'il est très possible que les rèserves de produits naturels, mesurées en termes de services qu'elles peuvent encore offrir, soient plus élevées aujourd'hui qu'elles ne l'étaient il y a, disons, deux siècles. L'auteur indique měme ‐ paradoxalement ‐que mesurées en termes de leur contribution prospective au bien‐ȩtre de l'humanité, ces réserves peuvent mȩme s'accroi̧tre, annee apres année. Cependan
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Baumol, William J., 1985. "On the Possibility of Continuing Expansion of Finite Resources," Working Papers 85-29, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
  • Handle: RePEc:cvs:starer:85-29
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yunwei Li & Qiuping Ji & Zijie Wang & Zishan Xiong & Simeng Zhan & Yiping Yang & Yu Hao, 2022. "Green energy mismatch, industrial intelligence and economics growth: theory and empirical evidence from China," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 24(10), pages 11785-11816, October.
    2. England, Richard W., 2000. "Natural capital and the theory of economic growth," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(3), pages 425-431, September.
    3. Kostas Bithas & Panos Kalimeris, 2017. "The Material Intensity of Growth: Implications from the Human Scale of Production," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 133(3), pages 1011-1029, September.
    4. Olivier Godard, 2004. "La pensée économique face à la question de l'environnement," Working Papers hal-00242937, HAL.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cvs:starer:85-29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Stubing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aenyuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.