LEARNING OUTCOMES

Knowledge and understanding.
Students should acquire adequate knowledge of the relationship between environmental protection, economic efficiency and market failure.

Applying knowledge and understanding.
Students should be able to understand and critically evaluate the role of public and environmental policies aimed at orienting and regulate markets and economic agents toward the goal of the economic and environmental sustainability.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Topics covered include:

•     The Environmental Economics
•     Scarcity, resource allocation and optimization
•     Non-renewable resources: intertemporal models for optimal extraction
•     Policies for renewable resources. Substitutability of natural capital and scarcity
•     sustainable development and growth patterns
•     Efficiency and control of environmental problems
•     Environmental externalities and pollution
•     Economic and fiscal instruments for environmental control
•     Economic analysis and collective action for decision-making purposes
•     Economic evaluation techniques for assessing social costs and benefits
•     Intergenerational equity
•     Environmental impact assessment, strategic environmental assessment and the multi-criteria techniques
   

Methodologies considered are:

•  Hedonic prices
•  Contingent valuation
•  Choice experiment
•  Deliberative democracy and other no-market approaches