Endogenous growth,trade,and the environment.
详细信息
- 作者：Prasertsom ; Nujin.
- 学历：Ph.D.
- 年：2011
- 导师：Peretto, Pietro,eadvisorTimmins, Christopherecommittee memberSmith, Martinecommittee memberConnolly, Michelleecommittee memberBurnside, Craigecommittee member
- 毕业院校：Duke University
- Department：Economics
- ISBN：9781124611204
- CBH：3453168
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：1576412
- Pages：93
文摘
This dissertation presents two essays on endogenous growth and renewable resources. The first essay explores the role of renewable resources in a tractable model of endogenous growth driven by horizontal and vertical innovation in the closed economy. The model is tractable in that it yields a complete, analytical characterization of the path of utility and the associated welfare level. This property is exploited to compare two cases of renewable resource management: open access and full property rights. The first case involves a common property problem in which agents ignore the long-term resource viability； the second fully internalizes the dynamics of the resource stock. Analysis shows that if the natural regeneration rate of the renewable resource is too low, the tragedy of the commons occurs. If, instead, the natural regeneration rate is sufficiently high, the steady-state growth rate of the economy is identical across the two management regimes. The reason is because there is no scale effect； that is, the steady-state growth rate of the economy does not depend on the labor or the resource endowment. However, the development path on which the economy transits from the developing stage no R&D activity) to the developed stage positive R&D activity) depends on the resource management regime. In particular, a developing economy under full property rights will cross its development threshold prior to one under open access. This threshold depends on the size of the manufacturing firms. When it becomes sufficiently large as a result of the decline in the number of firms over time, there will be an incentive for the remaining firms to conduct R&D. Given the same number of manufacturing firms, the firm size is larger under full property rights than under open access due to higher nominal expenditure per capita. Therefore, the development threshold will be reached sooner under full property rights. In other words, the economy will start engaging in R&D activities sooner and more quickly accumulate knowledge, which is the source of long-run growth. Moreover, switching from full property rights to open access is welfare reducing due to two effects. The first is through the price of the harvest good. Although the economy initially enjoys a lower price of harvest good, the price gradually increases as the resource becomes scarcer. Secondly, the competitive household instantaneously loses the resource income and thus spends less on manufacturing goods. This decreases the incentive for manufacturing firms to conduct R&D and results in a temporary deceleration of the growth rate of TFP relative to the baseline case of full property rights. The economy therefore experiences a cumulative loss of TFP relative to the baseline, which is the novel feature of our model of endogenous innovation. This mechanism has interesting and wide-ranging implications for the role of resources in development and growth. The second essay extends the model of endogenous growth and renewable resources into the open economy framework. The paper examines the effect of trade liberalization on resource-rich countries, based on a two-country model in which the difference in endowment of a renewable resource leads to asymmetric trade. In this model, the resource-rich economy trades its harvest good and final good for the final good from the resource-poor economy. Furthermore, the renewable resource is considered to be under open access, where there is no clear ownership over the resource, leading to overexploitation. Long-term productivity, in this case, stems from endogenously-determined knowledge accumulation. Under these circumstances, analysis shows that the resource-rich country will lose from trade due to two effects. The first effect is the instantaneous loss of income. Higher demand for the harvest good, from the combined domestic and international demand, diverts labor away from the production of technological goods to the harvest sector, where rent is zero. The second effect is a scarcity effect, which becomes more severe when trade results in a greater demand for the harvest good. Overexploitation of the renewable resource today leads to falling resource stock in the future, which is then reflected in the higher price of harvest good, other things being constant. Since the harvest good is an essential input to produce the final good, given the same amount of the other inputs, the amount of final good produced will also fall in the long run.