Jon Lovett is an internationally recognized expert on Natural Resource Management and professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Twente in Holland. Invited to Jalisco by his Ph.D. student, Arturo Balderes Torres, Lovett has spent the last few weeks studying the Primavera Forest and culminated his visit with a talk at the headquarters of the Mexican Association of Forest Professionals in Guadalajara.
In an exclusive interview with the Reporter, Lovett discussed the relationship between the city and the woods.
“I think this situation can best be understood by applying something called Coasian Bargaining,” he began. “This was developed in the 1960’s by a man called Ron Coase, a British-born economist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Problem of Social Cost,’ which won him the Nobel Prize. Coase said that whenever you find a person living in one place who affects somebody in another place, you have a social cost, a price that must be paid.”
In his paper, Coase gives the example of a doctor living close to a candy factory. The factory produces considerable noise while the doctor next door needs quiet so he can see his patients. Coase discusses the process of possible reconciliation between the two.
“They could resort to courts and the law,” said Lovett, “but that involves a lot of expense and is economically inefficient and if one side comes out better off, the other side ends up worse off.”
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