A NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE ON URANIUM FOR NUCLEAR POWER

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Pringle P. and Spigelman J.. 1982. . The Nuclear Barons . , London : : Joseph. .

2. Some of the material in this chapter has appeared elsewhere. See A.D. Owen, ‘The economics of uranium enrichment’, Prometheus, 1, 1, 1983, pp.5–22.

3. J. O. Reynolds, ‘Uranium fuelled electricity — An Australian perspective’, The Mining Review, September 1986, p.3. Emphasis added.

4. Reynolds was commenting on the same OECD studies referenced by Owen, and a more recent OECD study published since Owen's book appeared.

5. A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed., Macmillan, London, 1932, p. 11.

6. Mishan E. J.. 1981. . Introduction to Normative Economics . , London : : Oxford University Press. .

7. The wording of these two questions is determined, in part, by Coase's critique of the Pigovian (governmental) tax-subsidy scheme to address the allocational inefficiency created by externalities. Coase's solution, voluntary bargaining by the affected parties, is implied in what is now known as the Coase Theorem. See R. H. Coase, ‘The problem of social cost’, Journal of Law and Economics, III, October 1960, pp. 1–44. Coase argued that any assignment of liability, or property rights, for the uncompensated costs, whether imposed on the genertors of the externality or on the recipients, would achieve economic efficiency. The non-neutral allocational effects of such questions, implying as they do opposite property rights and thus opposite answers to the question ‘who has to compensate whom?’ has been emphasised by Mishan on the grounds that, for the Coase Theorem to be true, a necessary assumption is that the welfare effect is zero. See E. J. Mishan, ‘Pareto optimality and the law’, Oxford Economic Papers, 19, 3, 1967, pp.55–87. For papers concerned specifically with property rights assignments see E.G. Furubotn and E. Pejovich (eds), The Economics of Property Rights, Ballinger, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.

8. Arrow K. J. and Scitovsky T.. 1969. . “General Introduction. ”. In Readings in Welfare Economics . , Edited by: Arrow K. J. and Scitovsky T.. p. 1 London : : George Allen and Unwin. .

9. Niskanen W. A.. 1971. . Bureaucracy and Representative Government . , Chicago : : Aldine. .

10. Stigler G. J.. 1971. . The theory of regulation. . Bell Journal of Economics . , Vol. 2((1)): 3––21. .

11. Arrow K. J.. 1963. . Social Choice and Individual Values . , 2nd ed. , New Haven : : Yale University Press. .