 Environmental, Economic and Policy Aspects of BiofuelsDeepak Rajagopal and David Zilberman Foundations and Trends(R) in Microeconomics, 2008, vol. 4, issue 5, 353-468 Abstract: This review provides a timely summary of the current understanding of the various impacts and contributes positively to the policy debate. We have several key conclusions: (1) Biofuels are diverse and evolving; (2) Greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits vary significantly across various types of biofuels and are dependent on market conditions and policy situation; (3) Increase in income in the developing world would increase the demand for both food and fuel; (4) A diverse set of policies, which has been introduced or proposed, impacts biofuels directly; and (5) Much of the impact assessments of biofuels thus far are ex-ante estimates based on either optimization or equilibrium models. The short-term economic impacts of biofuels will depend on a variety of factors such as the harvest in any given year, the oil price, economic growth, strength of the dollar, and level of inventory. The long-term impacts will depend on factors such as investment in technological change, population and economic growth, climate change, and long-term policies toward energy, agriculture, and the environment. The biofuel policy debate is likely to be an ongoing one in the near future. Keywords: Environmental economics; Natural resource economics; Energy economics; Agricultural economics (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:now:fntmic:0700000029 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Foundations and Trends(R) in Microeconomics from now publishers |
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