آیا حداکثر ارزش بازار، سفارش بهره برداری از منابع تحت تاثیر قرار می دهد؟

This paper develops a dynamic model in which the marginal cost of production utilizing inexhaustible natural resources exceeds the marginal cost of production using any kind of exhaustible natural resources. The production capacity of the facility utilizing inexhaustible natural resources is finite in this model. We point out that–under certain assumptions–it is worth utilizing the more expensive inexhaustible natural resources strictly before the depletion of exhaustible natural resources, even if the objective of the decision-maker company is to maximize its market value.

The problem of devising an optimal order of utilizing natural resources relates to a production process where natural resources cannot be substituted by other production factors. In the general case, it is assumed that there exist one more expensive inexhaustible, and some less expensive exhaustible natural resources. Coal or oil for example can be considered as exhaustible natural resources in the electric power industry, while rivers can be considered as inexhaustible ones. Further, it is assumed that exhaustible and inexhaustible resources can perfectly substitute each others during the production process. Under the assumption of partial equilibrium and positive discount rate, Solow and Wan (1976) have proved that the optimal order of utilizing natural resources is determined by the strictly increasing order of the constant marginal factor costs. As Kemp and Long (1980) have pointed out, this statement is not necessarily valid in case of general equilibrium.

Theories of optimal economic growth or policy are generally based on the existence of a social welfare function (e.g. Blanchard and Fischer, 1992) or a social loss function (e.g. Barro, 1990) which are supposed to summarize society’s preferences. Schleich (1999) has pointed out that the formal analysis of environmental policy-making considers the government as an omniscient, benevolent dictator. However, these assumptions are strongly criticized in the literature. Since a social utility function is an index that summarizes the social ranking of alternatives in any moment, Arrow’s (1963) impossibility theorem clearly questions the validity of these concepts. Thus, many authors take the advantage of assuming the existence of a social utility function that represents the preferences of the dchief plannerT, who wishes to maximize the total social welfare, or assume that the economy is populated by a continuum of infinitely living households with identical preferences (Favard, 2002)