The proposition that limited natural resources provide a limit to growth and to the sustainable size of population is an old one. The natural resource that was the centre of the discussion in Malthus' day was land; more recently, some concern has been expressed over the limitations imposed by the supplies of oil, or more generally, energy sources, of phosphorus, and of other materials required for production. Those who predicted imminent doom in the nineteenth century were obviously wrong. Were they simply wrong about the immediacy of catastrophe, or did they leave out something fundamental from their calculations? There are at least three economic forces offsetting the limitations imposed by natural resources: technical change, the substitution of man-made factors of production (capital) for natural resources, and returns to scale. This study is an attempt to determine more precisely under what conditions a sustainable level of per capita consumption is feasible, to characterize steady state paths in economies with natural resources, and to describe the optimal growth path of the economy, in particular to derive the optimal rate of extraction and the optimal savings rate in the presence of exhaustible natural resources.

Journal Article Growth with Exhaustible Natural Resources: The Competitive Economy Get access Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz St Catherine's College, Oxford and Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 5, December 1974, Pages 139–152, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296378 Published: 01 December 1974

Journal Article Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping Get access Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 2, April 1974, Pages 219–255, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296714 Published: 01 April 1974

I. Introduction, 194.--II. The model, 196.--III. The market equilibrium, 205.--IV. Optimal allocation of labor and determination of urban wage level, 207.--V. Wage subsidies, 214.--VI. Wages and shadow price of labor in the public sector, 218.--VII. Urban income taxes, 220.--VIII. Concluding comments and summary, 222.--Appendix: "nominal" and "expected" urban wages and the unemployment rate, 223.

Economics has long been plagued with controversies: the Keynesian-monetarist controversy, the investment function controversy (is the elasticity of substitution unity?), the liquidity preference-loanable funds controversy. Geoffrey Harcourt has extended his survey article from the Journal of Economic Literature (1969) into a book dealing with one of the latest of these so-called controversies, that between Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning capital theory. The book is more balanced and more complete than the original survey article and includes some good pieces of exposition. The problems that I find with the book are basically problems I find with the Cambridge (U.K.) theory of which he is a partisan on one side-as, I suppose, I am on the other--and so, rather than focus on any errors and confusions which are peculiar to Harcourt, I prefer to focus on three of the major issues involved in the dispute and to suggest, in doing so, where Harcourt (and the Cambridge [U.K.] theorists) have gone astray.

This paper extends the theory of optimal taxation and government production to open economies. Appropriate rules for project evaluation and the determination of consumption, production, and trade taxes under a variety of restrictions (e.g., less than 100 percent profit taxes, government budget constraint, foreign exchange constraint) are derived. Among the results are (a) international prices should be used for evaluating public projects, unless there is a government budgetary constraint or there is a quota (this result does not require that tariff rates be optimally chosen); (b) no tariff should be levied on intermediates and only consumption taxes should be employed if there are 100 percent profit taxes. If profits are not taxed at 100 percent, both consumption and trade taxes should be employed.