Renewable resources, property-rights regimes and endogenous growth

Abstract

We extend Brander and Taylor's [Brander, J.A., Taylor, M.S., 1998. The simple economics of Easter Island: a Ricardo-Malthus model of renewable resource use. Am. Econ. Rev. 88, 119–138.] model of feast and famine cycles on Easter Island using Galor and Weil's [Gailor, O., Weil, D.N., 2000. Population, technology and growth: from Malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond, Am. Econ. Rev. 90, 806–28] model of endogenous technological advance, where technological change is related to the population. We note that different property-rights regimes will influence the relative direction of technological advance—whether that advance is in harvesting technologies or in technologies that influence the growth rate of some renewable biological resource. Property-rights regimes that favor biological growth rates over harvest rates tend to dampen feast–famine cycles, while those that favor harvest efficiency worsen such cycles.