Environment and Development Economics

Edited by:
  • Charles Perrings
Cambridge University Press. 4/yr.£84, $126 (institutional); £44, $66 (personal); £22 (developing countries)
Credit: MARK DOBSON

It is the dominant world-view of applied social and natural scientists that the nature of economic preferences for natural resources and the environment is central to understanding why environmental change is occurring. Given the increasing scarcity of quality environments in all societies, and the apparent lack of success of regulators and individuals to stem the excesses caused by corporate, state and individual misuse of resources, insights from interdisciplinary research are required ever more urgently.

This journal provides evidence that analysis of these relationships is a burgeoning, policy-relevant field. In the first volume, applied papers examine such issues as the consequences of forest cover change; the intergovernmental economic institutions of the United Nations and their, at best, ambiguous role in sustaining the world's resources; epidemiology and environmental change; and economic incentives for conserving biological resources in contexts such as the ivory trade and wildlife hunting.

The target audience is primarily economists rather than other social scientists and natural scientists. Economists often argue that many decision-makers in government and other organizations are attuned to economists' ways of thinking and so they have a special place in the policy process, but not everyone believes what economists say.

The journal plugs a hole in the literature, but it is one that has already been rapidly filling in the past few years with journals such as Environmental and Resource Economics and Ecological Economics, with which this journal shares many editorial board members.

The journal is attractively produced and contains both applied and theoretical papers and a policy forum section in each of the first year's issues. It is not in the prohibitively expensive category for some journals in this field. On the basis of the first volume, the journal deserves a place on the library shelves of universities and government ministries of planning and resources.