Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach

In a new book “Environmental Markets”  Terry L. Anderson and Gary D. Libecap explain the prospects of using markets to improve environmental quality and resource conservation. No other book focuses on a property rights approach using environmental markets to solve environmental problems. Anderson and Libecap apply this approach to land, water, wildlife, fisheries, and air. The book has been published in May 2014. It concludes by discussing tougher environmental problems such as ocean fisheries and the global atmosphere. The authors compare a market-based property rights approach with standard approaches to these problems using governmental management, regulation, taxation, and subsidization, emphasizing that neither governmental nor market solutions are a panacea. Environmental Markets is the inaugural book in Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society, a new interdisciplinary series of theoretical and empirical research focusing on individual choice, institutions, and social outcomes, edited by Peter J. Boettke and Timur Kuran.

     If you are interested in receiving examination copies, please contact Ellena Moriarty at emoriarty@cambridge.org. The book is also available for purchase at Amazon.com

     Praise for “Environmental Markets”:

     “Two of the world’s leading scholars on property rights and the environment … offer a rich review of the myriad creative ways in which market forces can be harnessed to improve environmental quality. The book’s fresh perspective on the question of how best to solve problems ranging from climate change to overfishing reminds economists and their students to look before they leap, with regulation as a solution.”

–Sheila M. Olmstead, The University of Texas at Austin

     “The world is bedevilled by problems caused by lack of private property rights. Terry Anderson and Gary Libecap document just how many environmental problems could be solved by granting stronger property rights to tackle ‘tragedies of the commons,’ in which open access results in a destructive free-for-all.”

–Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist

TERRY L. ANDERSON is the president of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Anderson is the author or editor of thirty-seven books including, most recently, Tapping Water Markets with Brandon Scarborough and Lawrence R. Watson. He has been published widely in both professional journals and the popular press and has received many awards for his research and teaching.

GARY D. LIBECAP is Professor of Corporate Environmental Management in the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at PERC, Bozeman, Montana. ABOUT PERC—Founded more than 30 years ago, PERC—the Property and Environment Research Center—is the nation’s oldest and largest research center dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets. Learn more at PERC.org.