SABIIA - Sistema Aberto e Integrado de Informação em Agricultura (Sabiia)

As outlined, recurring concerns have surfaced since the 1700s that economic growth may prove to be unsustainable. These concerns have been expressed again and have intensified in recent decades but their foundation differs from that of Malthus. The rapid economic growth of China and India have added to these worries. Recent discussions by economists of the desirability of achieving sustainable economic development have mainly focused on measures to attain intergenerational equity in resource use and the dominant view is that each succeeding generation should be at least as well-off as its predecessor. While this is said to be an implication of Rawls’ principle of justice, this dominant rule does not fully reflect Rawls’ principle and it also can violate...

The Economics of Sustainability: A Review of Journal Articles

Palavras-chave: China; Economic growth; India; Intergenerational equity; Rawls’ principle of justice; Sustainable economic development; Consumer/Household Economics; Environmental Economics and Policy; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; International Development; O13; O44; Q01.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/97470

Pezzey, John C.V.; Toman, Michael.

Concern about sustainability helped to launch a new agenda for development and environmental economics and challenged many of the fundamental goals and assumptions of the conventional, neoclassical economics of growth and development. We review 25 years' of refereed journal articles on the economics of sustainability, with emphasis on analyses that involve concern for intergenerational equity in the long-term decision-making of a society; recognition of the role of finite environmental resources in long-term decision-making; and recognizable, if perhaps unconventional, use of economic concepts, such as instantaneous utility, cost, or intertemporal welfare. Taken as a whole, the articles reviewed here indicate that several areas must be addressed in future...

Sustainability and Optimality in Economic Development: Theoretical Insights and Policy Prospects

Palavras-chave: Economic efficiency; Intergenerational equity; Social optimality; Sustainable development; Environmental Economics and Policy; Q20; D60; D90.

Ano: 2002

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10683

Farzin, Y. Hossein.

This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general zero-net-aggregate-investment condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of the maximin criterion of intergenerational justice is too demanding to be practical, especially in the context of developing countries. The maximin criterion of sustainability may be more appealing to the rich advanced industrial countries, but is too costly and ethically unreasonable for developing nations as it would act as an intergenerational poverty equalizer. The paper suggests that a compromise development policy that follows the optimal growth approach but...

Decomposing the social discount rate

Palavras-chave: Sustainability; Intergenerational equity; Optimality; Discounting; Development policy; International Development; Q01; Q56; O21; O13; D62; D63.

Ano: 2007

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/7447

Managing Forests for Sustainable Economic Development: Optimal Use and Conservation of Forests

Scarborough, Helen.

Recent modelling of the costs and benefits of climate change has renewed debate surrounding assumptions regarding the social discount rate in analysing the impacts of environmental change. Previous literature segments the social discount rate into being influenced by two key factors; the rate of pure time preference and the elasticity of marginal utility of future consumption. These components of the social discount rate reinforce the linkages between the choice of social discount rate and intergenerational distribution. In an extension of previous work by the author on intergenerational distributional preferences, this paper discusses the relationship between intergenerational equity and the social discount rate. The work has significant policy...

Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation

Palavras-chave: Intergenerational equity; Social discount rate; Environmental Economics and Policy.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/59156

The conservation of natural forests contributes significantly to the goal of achieving sustainable economic development. There is, however, growing concern that natural forests (which provide tangible and intangible economic benefits to humankind) are being lost at a rate which (combined with other factors) seriously threatens sustainable economic development because of the environmental and social impacts of such loss. There is little doubt that in order to achieve sustainable development, multifunctional forest ecosystems (as well as other important ecosystems) need to be managed appropriately. However, determining the socially optimal level of conservation and use of forests is a challenging task. From a human point of view, it is clearly not optimal to...

Palavras-chave: Discount rates; Ecosystem services; Environmental conservation; Forests; Intergenerational equity; Multifunctionality; Resource economics; Sustainable development; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Environmental Economics and Policy; Q20; Q23; Q56; Q57.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/90465

Conservation Value

This paper outlines the significance of the concept of conservation value and discusses ways in which it is determined paying attention to views stemming from utilitarian ethics and from deontological ethics. The importance of user costs in relation to economic decisions about the conservation and use of natural resources is emphasised. Particular attention is given to competing views about the importance of conserving natural resources in order to achieve economic sustainability. This then lends to a discussion of the value of conserving natural resources in order to meet the moral obligations of present generations to future generations. Anthropogenic views of the value of conserving natural resources (for example, derived from utilitarian ethics) are...

Recursive Sustainability: Intertemporal Efficiency and Equity

Palavras-chave: Anthropogenic values; Conservation value; Deontological ethics; Ecocentric values; Economic sustainability; Intergenerational equity; Natural resources; Neo-Malthusianism; Precautionary motive; Sustainability; Sustainable development; User costs; Utilitarian ethics; Environmental Economics and Policy; Q01; Q20; Q30; Q50; Q51.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/90879

Sustainable Decision-making: The State of the Art from an Economics Perspective

Knapp, Keith C..

PV-optimality in a capital-resource economy can imply decreasing utility over some portion of the time horizon. Various criteria have been proposed to maintain intergenerational equity defined as nondeclining utility, but these have some limitations and problems. This paper proposes a new welfare criteria incorporating present value to maintain efficiency, and an equity function with convex costs on declining utility. This criterion is economically efficient, time-consistent and recursive. An extension of dynamic programming to multiple value functions is developed to solve this problem. Increasing the equity weight increasingly eliminates declining portions of utility time paths. Sustainability implies increasing consumption in the early time periods and...

Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation

Palavras-chave: Growth; Environment; Intergenerational equity; Dynamic programming; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods.

Ano: 2006

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/21472

Toman, Michael.

Government, corporate and other decision makers are more and more often being urged to 'act sustainably' and to pursue policy paths toward 'sustainable development.' However, application of these concepts is hampered by serious interdisciplinary disagreements about the interactions of humans with their environment. Moreover, reducing disagreements about sustainability cannot be achieved solely through an improvement in scientific knowledge. These observations lead me to express skepticism about the capacity of any more or less mechanistic rule, economic, scientific or otherwise, to provide definitive and reliable answers about sustainable policies or conduct. However, there are processes and procedures that can help guide decision-making. I underscore the...

Discounting the Distant Future: How Much Do Uncertain Rates Increase Valuations?

Palavras-chave: Sustainable development; Cost-benefit analysis; Intergenerational equity; Multicriteria analysis; Social values; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; A12; A13; B41; D61; D63; H43; Q28.

Ano: 1998

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10602

Newell, Richard G.; Pizer, William A..

Costs and benefits in the distant future-such as those associated with global warming, long-lived infrastructure, hazardous and radioactive waste, and biodiversity-often have little value today when measured with conventional discount rates. We demonstrate that when the future path of this conventional rate is uncertain and persistent (i.e., highly correlated over time), the distant future should be discounted at lower rates than suggested by the current rate. We then use two centuries of data on U.S. interest rates to quantify this effect. Using both random walk and mean-reverting models, we compute the certainty-equivalent rate that is, the single discount rate that summarizes the effect of uncertainty and measures the appropriate forward rate of...

Mock Referenda for Intergenerational Decision-making

Palavras-chave: Discounting; Uncertainty; Interest rate forecasting; Climate policy; Intergenerational equity; Risk and Uncertainty; D90; E47; C53; H43; Q28.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10743

Kopp, Raymond J.; Portney, Paul R..

Traditional applications of benefit-cost analysis make use of what we refer to as the "damage function and discounting" (or DFD) approach. This approach is well-suited to the analysis of projects for which the principal benefits and costs occur within the next thirty to forty years, say. However, for projects with significant intergenerational consequences--i.e., impacts that do not arise for hundreds of years or more--the DFD approach becomes almost intractable. We propose an alternative conception of benefit-cost analysis for intergenerational decision-making--the mock referendum--that is: (i) arguably more consistent with the tenets of modern welfare economics; (ii) more amenable to the analysis of long-term projects or policies; and (iii) consistent...

Core Issues in the Economics of Biodiversity Conservation

Palavras-chave: Discounting; Non-market valuation; Intergenerational equity; Contingent valuation; Labor and Human Capital; D6; H4.

Ano: 1997

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10745

Critically reviews the following core issues in the economics of biodiversity conservation: reliance on the stated preferences of individuals as a guide to biodiversity conservation, the relevance of the phylogenetic similarity principle (and other attributes of organisms) for the survival of species; the implications of the Noah’s ark problem for selecting features of biodiversity to be saved and the difficulties raised by criteria based on safe minimum populations of species or on minimum environmental standards; the extent to which the precautionary principle can be rationally used to support the conservation of biodiversity; the impact of market extensions and globalization, as well as market and other institutional failures, on biodiversity loss; the...