This book represents both a textbook and a monograph. Part I entitled 'Basics' mainly contains textbook material and this is also partly true for Part II. Here the precise de nition and characterization of the not so well-known notion of interg- erational ef ciency within Diamond's two-period overlapping generations model gures prominently. In Part III, a renewable natural resource is introduced in the log-linear Cobb-Douglas overlapping generations model, and the ef ciency c- cepts developed in Part II are applied. The balance among material for a textbook und for a monograph is approximately even. In Part IV research monograph ch- acteristics gain progressively prominence. While this part dealing with intergene- tional equity in perfectly competitive market economies presents already published work, the last part focusing on harvest cost contains still unpublished work. Asthesubtitle ofthepresentbookannounces,ourintentionisto provideanint- duction to the not so widespread overlappinggenerationsapproach to intertemporal resource economics.
It is introductory in that utility and production functions are functionally speci ed such that the interested reader can derive explicit solutions to intertemporal general equilibria. However, we do not primarily aim at enhancing the reader's skill of solving general equilibrium models-we rather aim at prov- ing the tools for coping with analytically much more advanced dynamic general equilibriummodelswith renewable natural resources,published in leading journals. This book emerged out of lectures of the rst author within the master programs of the University of Life Sciences in Vienna and at Karl-Franzens-University of Graz.