Book Overview

The book, Sustainability and Resources: Theoretical Issues in Dynamic Economics, presents a collection of mathematical models dealing with sustainability and resource management. The focus in Part A is on harvesting renewable resources, while Part B explores the optimal extraction of exhaustible resources. Part C introduces models dealing with uncertainty. Some are descriptive models; others have deep roots in intertemporal welfare economics.

The tools of dynamic optimization developed in the 1960s are used in a formal, rigorous presentation to address wide-ranging issues that have appeared in academic research as well as policy debates on the world stage.

The book also provides a self-contained treatment that is accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, who are interested in dynamic models of resource allocation and social welfare, resource management, and applications of optimization theory and methods of probability theory to economics.

For researchers in dynamic economics, it will be an invaluable source for formal treatment of substantive macroeconomic issues raised by policymakers. The part dealing with uncertainty and random dynamical systems (largely developed by the author and his collaborators) exposes the reader to contemporary frontiers of research on stochastic processes with novel applications to economic problems.