Modeling Interacting Resource-Economy Systems

The author examines the interactions between economic systems and those sectors of the economy that produce resources, broadly defined. He presents a general scheme for modeling these interacting systems that can be used to analyze both the structural dynamics of the sector concerned and its interrelations with the overall development of the economy. The method links a process model of the sector of interest with other economic models within an optimization framework, although the optimization is an analytical means rather than an end in itself. The approach is flexible and has the advantage that the individual models can be built and used separately, whilst at the same time making the fullest possible use of information (particularly subsystem shadow prices) derived from individual runs