A CRITICAL STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES IN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

The natural environment has attracted heightened academic and policy interest since the end of the 1980s. This paper reviews the literature to provide deeper insights on the nature of environmental resources, that component element, and their essential economic characteristics. Current literature explicitly emphasizes two points. First, many environmental resources are renewable resources and have the futures of public goods-accessible to all at no change-with the result that such resources are open to over-exploitation to the point of extinction in many cases, which have social costs. Second, environmental resources constitute natural capital and should be admitted as a component of national capital stock, which gave rise to the notion of sustainable development whose essential argument is that current economic development should be made to be compatible with investment in environmental resources for future generations