 Preserving or escaping? On the welfare effects of environmental self-protective choicesAngelo Antoci and Simone Borghesi Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2012, vol. 41, issue 2, 248-254 Abstract: In modern societies individuals often try to alleviate their personal damages from environmental degradation by increasing their consumption of private goods. Although this “self-protective” behavior is very frequent in industrial economies, insufficient attention has been paid to its economic and environmental consequences. In this paper we show that such a behavior can make everyone worse-off. For this purpose, using as paradigmatic case a two-islands evolutionary model, we prove analytically that environmental “self-protection” may trap the system into an undesirable (Pareto-dominated) situation and discuss a few real-life examples in which this mechanism may have actually occurred. Although the proposed model is deliberately extremely simple, it may provide some interesting insights on an aspect that has been mainly ignored in the literature so far. Keywords: Self-protective choices; Defensive expenditures; Environmental degradation; Negative externalities; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:41:y:2012:i:2:p:248-254 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2011.12.012 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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