ABSTRACT
S carcity and growth are the core concerns of this book. At RFF they have been linked, in the past, by concern whether scarcity of natural resources would act as a brake on economic growth. In the study by Barnett and Morse (1963) that initiated this line of research 40 years ago, scarcity was identified with rising prices (in real terms). The key empirical result of their work was that, by the test of rising prices, resource scarcity in the United States (except for lumber) had not increased since the end of the nineteenth century. They attributed this favorable trend to technological progress in the exploration for and processing of raw materials. When Smith and Krutilla (1979) revisited the topic, they reached much the same conclusions, despite the sharp increases in petroleum prices in the early 1970s.
