2011-2012 Academic Catalog

Apr 19, 2024

2011-2012 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ECON 100 - Local Eating to Global Warming: Case Studies in Environmental Economics

The department of economics regularly offers a first-year seminar. For the Fall 2011 semester the subject of the seminar focuses on case studies in environmental economics. Economics is a social science that studies the allocation of resources in society, focusing specifically on how individuals make choices in organized markets as well as in informal situations. In this course we will develop understandings of: the fundamentals of economics, including the normative foundations of economics and what we mean by efficiency; the requirements of efficient markets, and the conditions under which markets fail; economic techniques for measuring the value of environmental goods and services that are not traded in markets; the economics of natural resources, including the optimal management of both renewable and non-renewable resources and methods of management of common property resources; the economics of externalities and the environmental policies designed to reduce them; environmental regulation and the use of market-based incentives. With this background we will apply these tools to a number of different case studies including water and forest management, local food systems, and global warming. Fulfills the Global Perspective requirement.