Open AccessHUMAN FERTILITY DECISIONS AND COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES: A DYNAMIC ANALYSIS
Author(s) -
RUSESKI GORAZD,
QUINN JOHN
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
natural resource modeling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.28
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1939-7445
pISSN - 0890-8575
DOI - 10.1111/j.1939-7445.2007.tb00214.x
Subject(s) - stock (firearms) , population , fertility , renewable resource , economics , microeconomics , human resources , resource (disambiguation) , natural resource , environmental economics , computer science , ecology , geography , demography , renewable energy , sociology , biology , computer network , archaeology , management
. In rural areas of developing countries, parental decisions on number of offspring may be made on the basis of the role of children in harvesting local common property renewable resources. It has been argued that this may lead to a cycle of human over‐population and resource over‐exploitation. To investigate the plausibility of this argument, we present a discrete dynamic model with two state variables representing human population level N and resource stock level S. The model is similar to one given by Nerlove and Meyer but differs in several important respects. It is assumed that, in each over‐lapping generation of parents and children, parents decide how many children to have based on their resulting share of the local resource harvest and the costs associated with child‐rearing. Using simulation and analytical methods, the long term steady state population and resource stock levels for this dynamic noncooperative game are contrasted with the steady state when parental fertility decisions are made in a cooperative manner.