The environment, defined broadly to include both reproducible and natural resources, such as petroleum reserves and wildlife parks, supports all economic and other social activity. The notion of sustainable development arises from a concern that future well-being could be eroded by the pursuit of economic goals which degrade and deplete finite resources.While such concerns are not new, the focus of debate has shifted within the past twenty years. Following the first oil price shock in the early 1970s, questions about whether or not it is possible to maintain growth while energy stocks are declining were brought to the fore. In recent years, however, concerns about the possible negative impact of exploration activity and fossil fuel use on the natural environment — also considered a finite resource — have gained prominence.But achieving sustainable resource use involves making trade-offs. For example, open access to a highly prospective site to help meet the energy needs of current and future generations has to be weighed against the site being partially or fully closed to exploration in order to completely preserve the value of the natural environment inherent in the site.To answer questions about environmental tradeoffs requires judgments about the relative social values of alternative uses of the sites in question. Information based on commercial exploration assists in making such judgments. By upgrading knowledge about the economic and social value of a natural resource, the information gained from exploration can help with making judgments about sustaining or conserving the human environment for future generations. Indeed, because the outcome of the exploration process has both social and commercial implications, it is likely that the level of exploration activities chosen for purely commercial reasons may be lower than the level that would be considered optimal if full account were taken of the trade-offs inherent in maintaining or improving the quality of life of future generations.The purpose in this paper is to investigate the role that exploration can play in improving economic and social well-being generally. To do this, petroleum exploration activity is separated into two phases — first, 'low impact' exploration such as the collection of seismic data and, second, drilling. The key contribution of this paper is to highlight conditions under which levels of low impact exploration, as determined by commercial considerations alone, are likely to be less than the socially optimal level.
There has been a sharp decline in the rate of economic growth in many developing countries in the 1980s compared with the 1970s. Reduced availability of external finance following the international debt crisis has been identified as one of the most important factors responsible for this decline. At the same time there has been a slowdown in the rate of growth of food imports to these countries, particularly to the highly indepted ones. The focus in the paper is on the implications for international agricultural commodity markets of a dept write‐off in developing countries. To analyse these implications a world agricultural trade model is used. Specifically, the analysis covers the effect of existing debt on the permanent incomes of developing debtor countries and developed creditor countries, and hence the effect on agricultural commodity markets. The results indicate that, if the debts of the developing countries were written off, prices would improve in consequence of the resulting rise in their permanent incomes. If the debt write‐off also led to growth in developing countries returning to the levels prevalent before the debt crisis, the improvements in world prices would be likely to be much larger.
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