By Edward B. Barbier
All through a lot of heritage, a severe driver at the back of worldwide fiscal improvement has been the reaction of society to the shortage of key ordinary assets. expanding shortage increases the price of exploiting latest traditional assets and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and preserve extra of those assets. in spite of the fact that, economies have additionally replied to expanding shortage by way of acquiring and constructing extra of those assets. because the agricultural transition over 12,000 years in the past, this exploitation of recent 'frontiers' has frequently proved to be a pivotal human reaction to usual source shortage. This booklet presents a desirable account of the contribution that common source exploitation has made to financial improvement in key eras of global background. This not just fills an incredible hole within the literature on fiscal historical past but in addition indicates how we will be able to draw classes from those previous epochs for achieving sustainable financial improvement on this planet at the present time.
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Extra resources for Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation
Example text
It appears that the Contemporary Era is a historical anomaly that poses an intriguing paradox: why should economic dependence on natural resource exploitation and frontier land expansion be associated with “unsustainable” resource-based development in many low- and middle-income countries today, especially as historically this has not always been the case? 43 For frontierbased expansion to be ultimately successful, it must lead to eficient and sustainable management of natural resource exploitation capable of yielding substantial economic rents.
However, the Golden Age was also notable for an important transition in the process of frontierbased economic development in world history. Since the Agricultural Transition, global economic development had been dependent on i nding and exploiting new sources of “horizontal” frontiers – arable land and biomass energy. By 1913, as Europe, the United States and Japan had proved, increasing national wealth now depended on the successful exploitation of “vertical frontiers” – subsoil wealth of fossils fuels, ores and minerals – for the development of manufacturing and industries.
125 on Wed Dec 26 04:51:24 WET 2012. 002 Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2012 34 Introduction: scarcity and frontiers scarcity and energy insecurity are generating worldwide impacts. The world economy may be on the verge of a new era, the Age of Ecological Scarcity. Chapter 10 then explores the question, if we are facing a new Age of Ecological Scarcity, what lessons can be learned from past eras of frontier-based development? The starting point, as outlined in this introductory chapter, is the necessary and suficient conditions that allowed various economies to develop successfully through natural resource exploitation.
