Natural Resources and Sustainability

Abstract

Citizens often have to make up their minds about issues of social and economic policy, with nothing to guide them but vague intuitions and a few stray facts. One function of economic ana lysis is to help people in this matter. It does this, when it can, by picking out the main factors that influence the outcomes of alternative policy choices, perhaps measuring them and measuring the strength of their influence, and also defining their relation to one another. This last is important because it often turns out that better achievement of one goal necessarily means worse achievement of another. In other words, there are inevitable trade-offs. Economics can sometimes make it clear what the consequences of different policies might be, and why. Careful analysis often shows that what looked at first like matters of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ are really matters of ‘more or less’. What economic analysis cannot do is to make the citizens’ decision for them. That requires more than just analysis.