Environmental Economics and Management (Routledge Revivals)

10

The Exploitation of Non-renewable Resources

10.1 INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of the last century and round about the turn of the present century there was a public debate, just as heated as the present one, revolving round the question of the exhaustion of the world’s raw material resources by the industrial countries. The discussion abated somewhat when the First World War broke out. The inter-war years, with their low utilisation of capacity, feeble economic growth, and mass unemployment, moreover, provided no basis for renewing this discussion. The Second World War, too, provided the industrial countries with problems other than the exhaustion of resources and the protection of the natural environment. The period after the Second World ...