Most scarcities that underpin health disparities within and among countries are not natural; rather, they result from policy choices and the operation of social institutions. Using examples from the United States of America: the Chicago heat wave and hurricane Katrina, this paper develops "denaturalizing scarcity" as a strategy for enquiry to inform public-health ethics in an interconnected wor...

We consider a situation where an exhaustible-resource seller faces demand from a buyer who has a perfect substitute but there is a time-to-build delay for the substitute. We nd that in this simple framework the basic implications of the Hotelling model (1931) are reversed: over time the stock declines but supplies increase up to the point where the buyer decides to switch. Under such a threat o...

Imagine a world where government regulation of gasoline, justified by scarcity of supply, allowed 20% of the gasoline in the U.S. to be used for farming; 20% for manufacturing; 20% for home use; 20% for government; and another 20% held in reserve for future potential government uses. In this world, prices would regulate the use of gasoline within each sector, but consumers would pay vastly diff...

Increased material demand, scarcity issues and environmental awareness foster the need of remanufacturing. Even though the theoretical foundation of closed-loop supply chains is well developed, its implementation in education and practice still lacks momentum. Special characteristics of remanufacturing, such as the complexity caused by the united role of customer and supplier and remaining supp...

Drug supply shortages are common in health systems due to manufacturing and other delays. Frequently, shortages are successfully addressed through conservation and redistribution efforts, with limited impact on patient care. However, when Sandoz Canada Inc. announced in February 2012 that it was reducing production of a number of generic injectable drugs at its Quebec facility, the scope and ma...

This paper studies the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption. In standard endogenous growth models, which feature a strong scale e¤ect, an increase in the supply of labor encourages technological progress. In contrast, the famous Habakkuk hypothesis in economic history claims that technological progress w...