IO-year evolution of IEA. He cannot assume international petroleum events are familiar ground to his audi- ence. When he does get to the point, he discusses the pros and cons of Canadian membership rather succinct-

ly. Somewhat similarly, Michael Webb

traces the unique events that accom- panied the international marketing of uranium. His objective is to portray Canada - conventionally viewed as one of the more reliable of sources - as an insecure supplier. The problem in this case is not so much that ura- nium is a source of electric power but that it is the key component in nuclear devices. The resulting special con- cerns, such as nuclear proliferation, place uranium in a unique national and international security status. One would assume that government offi- cials would make allowances for this. So I do not think that Webb makes a convincing case that Canadian ura- nium policy may have generated an international feeling of insecurity ab- out Canada as a source of essential mineral commodities.

David Haglund devotes half of his opening chapter on the changing inter- national significance of strategic minerals to discussing the concepts and shifting definitions that one en- counters when using the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘strategic minerals’. Discussion of the vagaries of profes- sional terminology may have a certain intellectual appeal. But unfortunately in this case it seems to have been at the expense of more discussion of how this and subsequent chapters present the dynamic aspects of international mineral resource trade. This, in con- trast to a static viewpoint, has impor- tant policy implications when discus- sing geopolitics.

Advanced materials

A case in point is Haglund’s own references to early twentieth-century concerns about having in hand the resources essential to being an indust- rial power compared to our contem- porary concerns about mineral vulner- ability and related security matters. One only has to look at a map of the major mineral production centres and

trade flows of sixty years ago, com- pared to 1989, to be convinced of the rapidity and magnitude of change. In Chapter 6 Haglund’s case studies de- monstrating the declining military sig- nificance to the USA of Canadian nickel, oil and uranium serve to de- velop this thesis further.

The need to keep both national and international mineral policies con- stantly adapting to change has become even more obvious in the last three years. There is now a Canada/US trade agreement, which receives

only brief mention in some chapters. Resource cartels continue to find life uneasy and any past successes fragile. Maturing industrial nations now show a decline in their intensity of materials use. Current political events within most members of the communist bloc have been such that the resource con- sequences are hard to imagine. National security views may now need to change dramatically.

At the same time, the emerging use

of advanced materials could change the menu of what is essential and how security can be best served. What does this mean with respect to substitution? Stockpiles may have to begin to store more manufactured components and perhaps different or fewer raw mate- rials as a reflection of the integrated nature of industrial and military supp- ly flows. Moreover, the expected na- ture and duration of military conflict is always in a state of flux.

In summary, this volume does pro- vide much insight into Canadian mineral affairs of the recent past. But it really does not put Canada and its resources into a current perspective, along with the uncertainties, of the geopolitics of mineral resources in particular and materials trade in general as we approach the twenty- first century.

John J. Schanz Jr Colorado School of Mines

Golden, Colorado

A broad perspective

THE FORMULATION OF TIME PREFERENCES IN A MULTI- DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE: THEIR CONSEQUENCES FOR INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR AND COLLECTIVE DECISION-MAKING

Edited by Guy Kirsch, Peter Nijkamp and Klaus Zimmermann

Gower Publishing Company, Aldershot, UK, 1988,264 pp

Time is an essential feature of natural resource economics. It is especially prominent in the economics of non- renewable resources where the trade- off between present and future use stems from the finiteness of the re- source base. Intertemporal efficiency requires equating discounted net pro- fits over the life of the mine, meaning that the time term enters explicitly into the formulation. Intertemporal equity, or the distributive justice of resource availabilities across genera-

tions, is obviously time dependent, with the discount rate serving as a way of weighting the relative importance of society in the future. Since the same discount rate affects both criteria, this is sometimes construed to mean that the discount rate is the key element of natural resource allocation decisions.

Time preferences

This books offers a broad perspective on the subject of time preferences, which helps indicate the numerous ways in which the problem of resource economics is much more complicated than that of choosing an appropriate discount rate. In addition, the topic of the book is pertinent to several of the most profound environmental issues we face today and in the future. Un- like the problems of environmental pollution and waste management of the past two decades, solutions to the problems of global warming and toxic waste disposal will require us to im-

RESOURCES POLICY March 1990 77

Book reviews

prove our ability to formulate time preferences and to choose appropriate time horizons.

This is a collection of papers ema- nating from a conference at the Sci- ence Centre of Berlin, in 1985, which in turn was a follow up to a conference entitled. ‘Distributional Conflicts in Environment-Resource Policy’ held there in 1984. The volume’s contribu- tors include some of the most noted researchers in the field worldwide.

Narcissism

However, the compilation is repre- sentative of the current state of affairs of proceedings volumes. That is, given the emphasis on refereed publications in top journals, scholars do not neces- sarily present their best work at con- ferences, or, if so, do not have it published in the proceedings. In fact, Chapters 2 to 7 look as though they started out as thirty page papers for the conference, with the authors then being allowed to remove the twenty most important pages for submission to journals in their respective fields, leaving only background material and the teaser of a new idea or a good pedagogical example behind. Overall, the book does not break any new ground, although some chapters (to be discussed below) clarify some impor- tant concepts and might serve as the beginning for solid future work. (There is one exception: the chapter by Zimmerman on ‘Time preferences and budgetary decisions’ presents a new empirical analysis of decisions in FRGermany.)

Kirsch, Nijkamp and Zimmermann have done a very good job in editing, at least with regard to form. Each of the chapters reads clearly, which is an accomplishment since many of the au- thors are not from English speaking countries. There is a uniformity of style to the extent that each chapter starts out with a survey of breadth of the discipline and one cannot help but be impressed by references to Aristo- tle, Freud, Durkheim, Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and Thomas Jeffer- son. However, the substance is thin in many of the papers, and in some other cases starts off with promise but goes nowhere. For example, in his paper

78

‘Ideas about time in psycho-dynamic theories: their applicability to environ- mental decision-making’ Frank Pinner focuses on the concept of narcissism. This concept, which might simply be translated into a combination of self centredness and delusion, is seen as a pathological attitude toward time, which results in such problematic be- haviour as denial of serious problems or the overestimation of abilities to cope with them. However, within the fifteen pages of the chapter, only four paragraphs deal with the application to environmental decision making, hardly enough to make a convincing argument that this psychological con- cept is a key to understanding how societies deal with environmental problems.

Three of the better papers in addi- tion to Zimmermann’s, noted above, are by Russell Hardin, Peter Nijkamp and Jan Rouwendal, and Talbot Page. Hardin illustrates well how the dyna- mic sequencing of events results in some limitations to rational choice. He uses an iterated prisoner’s dilem- ma (a multistage extension of the sim- ple version, which allows for adjust- ments by one player to the other at each stage of the game). He also dis- cusses the problem of extending the analysis from the personal to the insti- tutional level. The hope of change in future conditions has an important effect on strategy, thus serving as the basis for some time trade-offs. The example illustrates how the inclusion of time transforms the problem from one in which there is a dominant strategy to one in which there is none and, moreover, to a situation where several logical routes may seem sound, but lead to absurd choices.

Social discount rate

Though Hardin does not say so expli- citly, a game theoretic approach would be an excellent one for analys- ing mitigation strategies for the global warming problem. It might readily capture the strategic behaviour result- ing from the free rider problem and from attempts of one country to en- force its own views of intrageneration- al or intergenerational world equity.

The paper by Nijkamp and

Rouwendal represents a very thor- ough review piece of three lines of analysis of the social discount rate: time preferences in future genera- tions, opportunity costs, and risk be- haviour. The authors make very vivid the lack of consensus in each of these three threads of thought. They offer a welfare theoretic approach, whose major feature is to separate the main influences on discounting and to apply them to the rate itself, with project specific aspects being adjusted in the cash flow portion of the problem. This framework is consistent with research that has called for variations in the rate of discount, but it offers a more structured way of doing this. Again, however, the authors offer only a one- page teaser of an exposition of their approach.

Social choice theory

The paper by Toby Page is a successful exercise in separating the issues of the social discount rate and intergenera- tional equity in the context of social choice theory. He begins by consider- ing the concept of intergenerational equity to be inherently the same as intragenerational equity, but notes that, since the latter includes a longer time horizon and larger reference set (of individuals), various complications arise. He also shows the extent to which, for example, intergenerational equity is an aggregation problem as well as an optimization problem. Finally, he is able to illustrate effec- tively his major point that the problem of intergenerational equity is far more sophisticated than the discount rate problem.

It is difficult to recommend this book without serious reservations. The specialist working on dynamic methodologies and their applications will find little of great value in the volume. It may be useful to those who seek some basic insights from other disciplines into the role of time in decision making.

Adam Rose The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA, USA

RESOURCES POLICY March 1990