Michel Moreaux devoted the early part of his career to industrial economics. In the late 1970s, he also began studying natural resources and the environment, with his first article on ground rents dating back to this period. Gradually this became his – and later, his unit's – main area of research.
"His work largely contributed to the rise of environmental economics in France and the recognition of French environmental economists on the international scene," said Hervé Guyomard, one of INRA's scientific directors. In 2000, Michel Moreaux created the Joint Research Unit for Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (LERNA) within INRA, with the goal of making it an international centre of academic excellence in five areas of theoretical and applied economics: energy, water use, risks, public regulation and agricultural activity. This was not his first attempt. In 1990, he was one of the founders of IDEI, the Institut d'économie industrielle, which was the precursor of the Toulouse School of Economics. He was also at the helm of the Mathematical and Quantitative Economics Research Group (GREMAQ) from 1987 to 1993. In less than a decade, LERNA – which he led for six years – has become Europe's top laboratory in the field, and is in the top ten in the world, based on the number of articles in environmental economics published in various scientific journals (1). "Economists have a thing for classification," he chuckled. Moreaux has over 160 articles and written contributions to his name.
"Environmental and natural resource economics uses the principles of economic analysis on a set of problems with a very specific structure. There are no markets for a large number of environmental goods, which are often public goods as well. Take the countryside, for instance. This leads to specific evaluation problems and regulatory modes that require the involvement of public authorities. Toulouse was intellectually equipped to tackle such problems, owing to the presence of Jean-Jacques Laffont, an eminent specialist in public economics and information theory, and the teams he formed. The discipline's other characteristic is the inclusion of major physical constraints that limit the deployment of society's activities. These constraints are nearly always dynamic and long term. We're talking 50 years, 100 years, maybe several centuries. Should we exhaust coal resources? If yes, in what time frame? These constraints change over time due to technical progress. The latter's advance is, in turn, regulated by the degree of restrictions that constraints place upon society. In the 18th century, 80% of the working age population was employed in agriculture, and the main constraint was the availability of good quality land. Ground rents represented 25% of the national product."
"The fear of running out of natural resources is nothing new," says this history buff, a former member of the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France. "At the end of the 17th century, eminent scholars believed that Western societies would be obliged to face a wood shortage. Colbert ordered the organisation of the Tronçay forest so that the French navy would not run out of marine lumber towards the end of the 20th century." Indeed, in France, forest cover shrank until the first third of the 19th century. The first iron-hulled vessels date back to the middle of the same century. Colbert's fears were thus not unfounded, even though the last trees from the first sowing, centuries old, were sold twenty years ago – to the wine and spirits industry, for barrels for the best French vintages! "Going beyond this anecdote, we should remember that it is hard not to take into consideration everything that the economics of uncertainty, of risk, can bring to environmental and natural resource economics."
For the long term, most of applied research consists, as in many other disciplines, of building scenarios, discussing the plausibility of their underlying hypotheses, and using economic models to deduce possible futures in a coherent manner. "Combining and comparing physical restraints and economic ones allows us to eliminate totally implausible scenarios," clarified Michel Moreaux. "This should be underscored. The famous Club of Rome report (2) is the textbook example of a model that neglected to take economic constraints into account. Forty years on, none of its predictions have been validated. So we're not really talking of a forecast in the strict sense of the word, but rather an exploration of possible futures and, perhaps, a prediction of future breaking points. It is also, therefore, an attempt to identify areas where scientific research efforts ought to be focussed. For instance, what type of energy should research be devoted to? What resources should be given to the ITER project (3)? How about research in bioenergy, as long as it doesn't use up too much land, to the detriment of resources that can be used for food? »
(1) RePEc, Research Papers in Economics : http://repec.org/
(2) An independent think tank formed by scientists, economists, industrialists, politicians, etc. working to address problems encountered by humanity. Its 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, also known as the Meadows Report, presaged a worrisome future. http://www.clubofrome.org
(3) Found in Cadarache, France, this international research facility receives strong support from the EU and was created with the mission to demonstrate that nuclear fusion could become a major source of energy. http://www.itercad.org
 Michel Moreaux, © INRA, C. Slagmulder
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