Environmental Economics

The cromulent economics blog

recent posts

About the authors

A textbook recommendation

From the inbox:

I have accepted a faculty position … and will be teaching an environmental economics course for the first time. I wanted to see if you had any recommendations for a textbook to be used in an environmental course without an intermediate microeconomics prerequisite. This class was designed to appeal to economics and non-economics majors and students are only required to take introduction to economics … prior to this course. … Do you have any recommendations for other intro texts, or would you use a standard text and stress intuition over math? 

My reply:

I'm using Tietenberg and Lewis, Environmental Economics and Policy, this semester in a course with no prerequisites. The book is full of stuff so I go really slow. So far I've only covered chapters 1 – 4, 14. The four part outline is 1. benefit-cost analysis, 2. environmental economics, 3. natural resource economics and 4. sustainability. There is an exam on Friday and then I'll start section 3 next week. 

Are there any other good suggestions?

Posted in
  1. Kevin J. Egan Avatar
    Kevin J. Egan

    At the Univ. of Toledo I teach an Environmental Economics class that has no prerequisite since half the class is environmental science/study students where this is the one and only required ECON course for their major. I use Field and Field, “Environmental Economics, An Introduction”. I like this book because it assumes no econ. knowledge and it is easy to follow for the student.
    However, the downside is it does not have some topics I want to cover. Here is the chapters I cover:
    Exam 1: Chp. 1, What is Environmental Economics?
    Chp. 2, The Economy and the Environment
    Chp. 3, Benefits and Costs, Supply and Demand
    Chp. 4, Economic Efficiency and Markets
    Exam 2: Chp. 5, The Economics of Environmental Quality
    Chp. 11, Command-and-Control Strategies: The Case of Standards
    Chp. 12, Incentive-Based Strategies: Emission Charges and Subsidies
    Chp. 13, Incentive-Based Strategies: Transferable Discharge Permits
    Tietenberg Textbook Chp. 6, The Population Problem (hand-out)
    Exam 3: Chp. 6, Frameworks of Analysis
    Book chapter, “Aesthetic Values of Lakes and Rivers” (hand-out; my own book chapter available from my homepage)
    The Economics of Buying Local (my hand-out)
    Field Textbook: Chp. 13, Marine Resources (hand-out; Tietenberg has a similar chapter too)

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Environmental Economics

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading