the middle class collapse and the environment abstract the thesis that unequal societies are harmful to the planet was defended by boyce 1994 in a framework based on the unequal bargaining power between rich and poor our study reinvestigates this theory by removing any reference to power in order to study the conditions under which it can still occur we show that a middle class collapse can aggravate or alleviate the burden on the planet depending on income disparities and weight of upward vs downward mobility moreover the paper shows how an appropriate environmental policy can increase the political acceptability of a social one designed for mitigating the deleterious effects of a middle class collapse through the reduction of ex post income disparities

sustainability and externalities is the internalization of externalities a sufficient condition for sustainability in an important contribution in ecological economics van de bergh 2010 correctly concludes that sustainability does not imply zero externalities however he continues with the delphic statement delphic statements were uttered by the renowned oracle of ancient greece at delphi they were phrased in such a way as to be self fulfilling because alternative interpretations covered every possibility without externalities the problem of sustainability vanishes if this statement refers to an impossible economic process that produces no externalities then he is right however it might be interpreted as stating that whenever environmental policy internalizes environmental externalities then sustainability will be ensured in this note i assert that in the real world where externalities prevail their internalization or neutralization in the traditional way cannot lead to sustainability only if internalization takes a very specific form that results in the inviolable preservation of environmental rights of future generations in pure biological terms can sustainability be ensured after revised the original commentary i resubmit it the issues raised by the editor have been carefully considered

challenges of responding to sustainability with implications for affordable housing abstract sustainability is one of the most contested ideologies of our time because everyone acknowledges that it must occur but no one can agree on what needs to change in response this is unsurprising because objecting to the goal of sustainability is like objecting to other inherently good goals like peace or freedom responses to sustainability exist on a long continuum with some interpreting sustainability to mean conservation at all costs and reduced economic growth while others suggest that the market will ensure sustainable outcomes eventually result further sustainability can be easily manipulated to justify predetermined outcomes there are indeed a multitude of conceptual and pragmatic challenges to operating on sustainability particularly when the scale shifts from a global goal to local action using the application of sustainability to affordable housing in australia as a case study this article argues that rather than limiting sustainable outcomes the existence of the sustainability debate which focuses on the many challenges is a positive indicator that sustainability may be attainable

economics ecology based communities and sustainability abstract this paper comments on the inadequacy of orthodox economics when communities perceive themselves as ecology based that is when they recognize that their livelihood depends upon living natural resources not surprisingly an economics largely developed in the context of a spatial a natural industrialization and designed to serve the interests policies and tools of the nation state is inadequate when addressing communities within the context of their regions and ecological systems the author suggests that a sustainability economics is needed and that its character can be better focused if based on a local and regional ecosystem perspective the critique is relevant to general economic praxis because all economies depend upon natural processes and all economic actors are socialized within communities an approach to development of a sustainability economics is suggested

towards an operational sustainability criterion abstract this paper examines the concept of sustainability and its implications for environmental policy analysis it builds on the premise that present society holds a moral obligation to pass on a world of undiminished life opportunities to members of future generations maintaining life opportunities in turn can be achieved by maintaining or improving a diverse set of resources and capabilities that support a person s freedom to define and pursue her own conception of the good life on an operational level this framework points to the following guideline for environmental policy protecting the rights of future generations requires either the conservation of environmental resources or compensatory measures including the provision of substitute technologies that ensure the fair and proportionate sharing of net benefits over intergenerational time scales in this framework resource depletion is permissible only if with reasonable certainty it would generate a pareto improvement relative to a baseline scenario involving strict resource conservation

double co2 and beyond benefits costs and compensation abstract economic decisions over what action if any to take concerning the greenhouse effect tend to revolve around the social discount rate implicitly the debate concerns how to attribute intertemporal weights to welfare and implies a moral stance that is rarely given explicit recognition refocusing on the outcomes of current actions emphasises the role of compensation a conflict is apparent between the view that the current generation need be unconcerned over the loss or injury caused to future generations because they will benefit from advances in technology investments in both man made and natural capital and direct bequests and the requirement to avoid harming the innocent changes in units of welfare cannot be viewed as equivalent regardless of their direction in general doing harm is not cancelled out by doing good the result is a rejection of the potential compensation principle which underlies the current economic stance and a reconsideration of the acceptability of compensation altogether the concept of human rights and a non utilitarian perspective are used to show how cost benefit analysis denies the existence of inalienable rights and economics limits the moral considerability of harm

sustainability and the intergenerational distribution of natural resource entitlements abstract the paper describes an olg economy with a single exhaustible resource that has amenity value the steady states of this economy form a continuum implying path dependency we compare three policy scenarios first a zero extraction policy of enforced conservation that avoids environmental degradation possibly at the expense of intertemporal efficiency second a grandfathering policy that endows the present generations with all resources and that ensures efficiency but cannot prevent a persistent decline in lifetime utility from one generation to the next third a trust fund policy where future generations receive claims for the natural resource of the three only the trust fund ensures efficiency and protects welfare of all generations

optimal growth resource amenities and the preservation of natural environments this paper examines the conditions for which it is optimal to permanently preserve natural environments in which a productive natural resource is found the conditions are more restrictive than those previously indicated in the literature on the economics of natural environments increasing consumption and declining commodity prices are not sufficient to warrant permanent preservation the initial capital stock can be an important determinant of the optimal level of preservation in addition resource amenity values will increase the initial resource price and decrease the rate of growth of the resource price the natural world provides a variety of services to the human community natural resources are essential inputs in the production of goods and services in addition the natural world generates a variety of amenity services including the scientific recreational and aesthetic value of preserved natural environments krutilla 1967 krutilla and fisher 1975a this paper examines the impact of resource amenity values on the optimal growth of an economy which depends upon natural resource inputs for the production of goods and services in particular the paper examines the conditions under which it is optimal to permanently preserve some natural environments in which the productive resource is found the conditions which warrant permanent preservation are more restrictive than previously indicated by the literature on the economics of natural environments increasing consumption and declining commodity prices are not sufficient to warrant permanent preservation in addition the initial capital endowment can be an important determinant of the optimal level of preservation

sustainability as opportunity this paper explores the relationship between sustainability concepts and contractarian principles of distributional fairness a commitment to equality of opportunity between contemporaries entails that life opportunities should be nondiminishing from generation to generation defining sustainability as nondeclining utility is analytically suggestive but practically problematic given the uncertainties that surround future preferences and technologies life opportunities may be sustained however by providing future generations with specific endowments of reproduced capital technological capacity natural resources and environmental quality in this setting capital resource substitutions are defensible only if there is compelling evidence that they would benefit both present and future generations

impact of government subsidies on household biogas use in rural china abstract in this paper we evaluate empirically the impact of biogas subsidies on household biogas energy use in rural china special attention was given to the problem of sample selection bias in assessing the impact of subsidies on biogas energy use because biogas subsidies often change the propensity for installing biogas digesters using data from a large scale household survey the results indicate that biogas subsidies did promote the construction of biogas digesters the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in subsidy cost ratio would lead to a 3 increase in digester installations we also found that biogas subsidies correlated negatively with average time of digester use a 10 percentage point increase in the subsidy cost ratio would result in a 4 3 reduction in the average working time of digesters these results suggest that the net effect of the current subsidy policy on rural household biogas use was near negligible indeed a 10 percentage point increase in the subsidy cost ratio resulted in a mere 1 15 increase in biogas use these findings indicate that biogas subsidies have possibly not been targeted effectively at households that would actually prefer to use biogas energy

science park location and new technology based firms in sweden implications for strategy and performance one logical way to assess the performance of science parks is to compare the performance of their firms to similar firms not located there a total of 273 new technology based firms ntbfs were surveyed of which 134 were on a science park and 139 were not on a park there were significant differences in the means of strategy dimensions between the on park and off park firms it can be seen that the ntbfs who located in science parks showed significantly greater emphasis on firm characteristics as innovation ability competitor and market orientation sales and employment growth high profits etc the differences indicates a slight advantage for the science park firms the off park sample reported proximity to other firms to be of higher importance than the on park sample in their choice of location however these differences do not show any clear pattern making it difficult to understand if ntbfs who locate on science parks are systematically looking for something different in their location

analysis of rural residential energy consumption and corresponding carbon emissions in china the analysis of rural residential energy consumption in china from 2001 to 2008 and corresponding impacts on climate change is presented in the paper it is found that rural residential energy consumption has shown obvious transition from non commercial energy to commercial energy the percentage of biomass energy consumption dropped from 81 5 in 2001 to 70 9 in 2008 while the percentage of commercial energy increased from 17 1 to 25 1 besides other renewable energy increased very fast with annual growth rate of 19 8 correspondingly total co2 emissions from rural residential energy consumption had significant increase from 152 2 million tons in 2001 to 283 6 million tons in 2008 the annual growth rate of per capita co2 emissions was nearly 2 times faster than that of urban area the major driving force for the consumption of commercial energy was the income of rural farmers while strong rural energy policies supported the development of renewable energy to satisfy the goals of energy supply and co2 emissions reduction in rural areas it is advised to change the energy structure and improve the energy efficiency such as to generate electricity using renewable technologies and to replace coal with modern biomass energy for cooking and heating

some economics of global warming the greenhouse effect itself is simple enough to understand and is not in any real dispute what is in dispute is its magnitude over the coming century its translation into changes in climates around the globe and the impacts of those climate changes on human welfare and the natural environment these are beyond the professional understanding of any single person the sciences involved are too numerous and diverse demography economics biology and the technology sciences are needed to project emissions atmospheric chemistry oceanography biology and meteorology are needed to translate emissions into climates biology agronomy health sciences economics sociology and glaciology are needed to identify and assess impacts on human societies and natural ecosystems and those are not all there are expert judgments on large pieces of the subject but no single person clothed in this panoply of disciplines has shown up or is likely to this article makes an attempt to forecast the economic and social consequences of global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and attempting to prevent it

from linear fuel switching to multiple cooking strategies a critique and alternative to the energy ladder model abstract promoting sustainable development requires evaluating the technical and policy options that will facilitate the adoption and use of energy efficient and less polluting cooking stoves and practices the transition from traditional to modern fuels and devices has been explained by the energy ladder model that suggests that with increasing affluence a progression is expected from traditional biomass fuels to more advanced and less polluting fuels in this paper we evaluate the energy ladder model utilizing data from a four year 1992 96 case study of a village in mexico and from a large scale survey from four states of mexico we show that an alternate multiple fuel model of stove and fuel management based on the observed pattern of household accumulation of energy options rather than the simple progression depicted in the traditional energy ladder scenario more accurately depicts cooking fuel use patterns in rural households the multiple fuel model integrates four factors demonstrated to be essential in household decision making under conditions of resource scarcity or uncertainty a economics of fuel and stove type and access conditions to fuels b technical characteristics of cookstoves and cooking practices c cultural preferences and d health impacts this model also allows better estimates of the expected fuelwood demand and indoor air pollution in rural households

environmental valuation under sustainable development environmentalism has evolved since the 1960 s from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the american experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world northern anxiety spread to the loss of tropical rainforests and biodiversity in the south where environmentalism evolved further in an encounter with indigenous interpretations conditions and priorities by the late 1980 s climate change emerged as a central issue in a now global discourse on the relationship between environment and development the principle of sustainable development that current needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to present is now widely accepted this paper illustrates that incorporating environmental values per se in decision making will not bring about sustainability unless each generation is committed to transferring to the next sufficient natural resources and capital assets to make development sustainable 11 refs 3 figs

entrepreneurial strategy and the presence of small firms a model is presented hypothesizing that the level of small firm presence in any given industry emanates from the exogenous stock of entrepreneurial talent a stochastic element of managerial and entrepreneurial talent entry deterrence and the entrepreneurial strategy deployed by small firms using data newly released by the u s small business administration the hypothesis is tested for a sample of 247 four digit standard industrial classification industries spanning the entire spectrum of firm sizes we find that consistently for all the measures of small firm size and for all of the time periods used the existence of entry deterrence and reliance upon innovative strategy explains a significant proportion of the variation in the presence of small firms

ecological thresholds a survey abstract the existence of ecological discontinuities and thresholds has been recognised by ecological economics as a key feature to take into account in the study of environment economy interactions this paper reviews some theoretical developments and empirical studies dealing with ecological phenomena involving non linear dynamics the literature about this issue reveals that there is abundant evidence of discontinuities and threshold effects as the consequence of human perturbations on ecological systems however due to the complexities involved the predictive capacity of ecology is limited and large uncertainties still remain

different ways of knowing a communicative turn toward sustainability abstract despite the urgency of the ecological crisis the steady continuation of environmental degradation suggests that new ways of interpreting problems and acting with environmental integrity may need to be considered this paper draws on a broad range of contemporary theory to argue that the conventional conceptualization of environmental problems has remained a largely disciplinary based exercise that has relied on abstracting the environmental issues from their real world complexity a practical articulation of the main environmental narratives reveals self referential discourses whose disciplinary based practices have insulated these approaches from a broad range of contemporary theorising and different ways of knowing the dominance of these approaches in environmental policy development has led to the continued acceleration of environmental degradation despite widespread political and social interest in its abatement this paper provides a critique of methodologies derived from the assumptions of instrumental rationalism and contemplates the potential for alternative communicative approaches and strategies for dealing with environmental policy development and implementation it is argued that a communicative approach to planning for sustainability represents a more appropriate strategy for mobilising a currently impotent environmental movement a communicative approach by explicitly dealing with the assumptions and motivations of contested positions in the sustainability debate it is argued offers the most pragmatic way of developing change strategies to deal with the complex issues surrounding environmental policy development and implementation

the social contingency of wants abstract economic models typically assume that individual wants are determined by forces exogenous to the economic system social psychology and consumer research in contrast support the view that the perceived benefits of goods and services are strongly affected by endogenously determined social norms we present a selective overview of the literature on the relationship between consumption and well being exploring the ways in which informal arguments from social science might be linked to formal models of economic behavior we find that the fixed preferences hypothesis leads to the systematic undervaluation of environmental services and the underprovisioning of environmental goods

the concept of joint production and ecological economics joint production is suggested as one of the conceptual foundations of ecological economics the notion of joint production springs immediately from the application of thermodynamics and has a long history in economic analysis considerations of joint production give rise to philosophical concerns relating to responsibility and knowledge the concept of joint production is easily comprehensible and is also constitutive and supportive of a range of concepts current in ecological economic thought 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

energy consumption practices of rural households in north china basic characteristics and potential for low carbon development reducing the climate impact of rural household energy consumption in china is complicated since it is bound up with deeply routinized daily practices and dependent from existing infrastructural systems of energy supply to assess the potential for low carbon development we first estimate the overall co2 emissions of rural households followed by a more in depth description and characterization of the different energy use practices within the households space heating turns out to be the largest emission source among domestic energy practices in north china we present lifestyle and context related factors that help to explain existing differences in domestic energy use practices of households the potential for low carbon development is discussed both at the demand side and the supply side at the demand side the use of more efficient technologies and cleaner energy sources for space heating seems to be a high potential measure for achieving low carbon households at the supply side the reduction of rural domestic co2 emissions could be effectively supported by making available to householders renewable and cleaner energy sources and technologies in order to be effective such low carbon energy options should take into account the income characteristics and lifestyles of rural householders

toward an economics of stewardship the case of climate abstract standard neo classical approaches to long term environmental problems such as climate change are unsatisfactory in relying on discounting in assuming an at least latent utilitarianism and relying on the measure of gross domestic product a framework built around trusteeship stewardship is set forth and advanced as a superior approach and its implications for climate stability drawn it is within a just emerging economics of stewardship that the tools of neo classical economics can help in finding the path to climate stability

one sided sustainability tests with amenities and changes in technology trade and population abstract if an economy with multiple consumption goods including environmental amenities uniquely maximises present value with constant discounting it is unsustainable at some time if either of two measures augmented net investment or the change in augmented green net national product are zero or negative then augmented denotes that time is treated as a productive stock which includes in each measure the value of future exogenous changes in technology or terms of trade adjustments are found to make each measure a test for individual sustainability when population grows exogenously the practical and philosophical rationale for testing sustainability in a present value maximising and therefore fully prescribed development path is discussed

reassessing the energy ladder household energy use in maun botswana abstract in the context of sub saharan africa s rapid urbanization improved insight into urban energy use is increasingly important based on the predictions of energy transition theory a regional shift from biomass to modern fuels has long been expected to occur in tandem with urban growth however trends observed in the region s towns and cities have often not followed such patterns and fuelwood continues to be important in most areas this paper examines the practical relevance of transition theory using a recent case study conducted by the authors in maun botswana and results previously reported in the literature it finds that despite the long term link between socio economic development and increased modern fuel consumption at the national scale the notion of transition does not accurately reflect ongoing energy use patterns at lower levels of aggregation this is chiefly because its model of household fuel switching largely dismisses the importance of active and strategic decision making by urban consumers and their responsiveness to structural factors such as relative fuel prices as the botswana case illustrates this weakness can significantly distort expectations and policies around urban fuelwood use

why the far distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate abstract a critical feature of the distant future is currently unresolvable uncertainty about what will then be the appropriate rate of return on capital to use for discounting this paper shows that there is a well defined sense in which the lowest possible interest rate should be used for discounting the far distant future part of any investment project some implications are discussed for evaluating long term environmental projects or activities like measures to mitigate the possible effects of global climate change

unraveling the veil of fuzziness a thick description of sustainability economics this article provides a thick description geertz 1973 of sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010a b have proposed as an alternative to ecological economics the new field of sustainability economics which has triggered various replies the purpose here is to order and to review these contributions building upon a literature review of sustainability economics the paper argues that the concept currently has more of a fuzzy and declamatory character the rhetoric mccloskey 1998 of sustainability economics contains general issues of sustainability economics externalities and the capability approach the article argues that it is currently not clear how the solutions for science and policy proposed by sustainability economics differ from those of ecological economics efforts should be directed towards further development of the theory and the operationalization of sustainability principles the systemic view of co evolutionary development social learning and sustainability economics normative underpinning merits more consideration in the debate about sustainability economics

joint production and consumption in traditional households fuelwood and crop residues in two districts in nepal forest conversion by agricultural households is the leading cause of deforestation yet we know little about agricultural household use of forest and tree products this article measures household production of and demand for fuelwood and fuel substitutes in two districts in nepal women play a larger role in collection in the district dependant on production from common forestlands men and agricultural capital are more important inputs in the district dependant on production from private lands the article also measures demand elasticities for fuelwood combustible agricultural residues and improved stoves a technological substitute each by household income group all price and income demand elasticities are less than one the substitution elasticities between residues and fuelwood are less than one residues are more important substitutes for low income households and improved stoves are more important substitutes for high income households

on the environmental discount rate abstract in this paper i show that environmentalism itself can provide a rigorous foundation for the low and declining discount rates that environmentalists seem to favor in long term cost benefit calculations if indeed it is a stylized fact that we are moving toward a world where environmental spending is increasingly important that scenario per se may significantly lower the social rate of return a formula is derived for the ratio of social to private discount rates as a simple function of two operational environmental parameters the formula is used to explain why the social rate of return ought to be lower than the private rate and why this gap called environmental drag when measured in terms of equivalent evaporation of national income may be expected to increase over time

path dependence in a ramsey model with resource amenities and limited regeneration this paper studies a ramsey optimal control economy with one consumer good extended to include several non renewable resources with amenity value the steady state equilibria of this economy are shown to form a continuum selection of the steady state to which the economy converges depends on the initial resource stocks hence unlike the usual ramsey models our model exhibits path dependency and postponement in the introduction of resource e ciency policies has long term e ects if the resource is renewable with a limited regeneration function the continuum becomes a turnpike that is optimal paths move along it towards the unique steady state the results also hold when there are several consumers 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

net national product as an indicator of sustainability net national product nnp can potentially serve several objectives among others to measure value added and to be an indicator of welfare in the aftermath of the world commission on environment and development however it also seems important to investigate whether the concept of nnp can serve as an indicator of sustainability my point of departure following hicks 1946 ch 14 is therefore to require that nnp should measure what can be consumed in the present period without reducing future consumption possibilities and in line with this to argue that the nnp should equal the maximum per capita consumption level that can be sustained if sufficiently many facilitating assumptions are made then a concept of nnp that serves as an exact indicator of sustainability can easily be constructed for instance for a closed economy with a constant population a stationary technology and with only one capital good it follows that the present does not reduce future consumption possibilities if and only if it does not decrease the stock of the single capital good hence under the assumption that the one capital good k is identical to the one consumption good x nnp defined as y x k measures the maximal sustainable consumption at time t because then x y is equivalent to k the purpose of this note is to establish that with multiple capital goods it is not in general possible to construct an exact indicator of sustainability on the

efficiency of conservationist measures an optimist viewpoint abstract we consider an economy with a consumer good capital a natural resource that provides amenity values and heterogeneous overlapping generations we compare a benchmark grandfathering policy that ensures efficiency through privatization with a policy of enforced resource conservation it is shown that i conservationist measures do not cause any pareto inefficiency irrespective of whether they pass a cost benefit test moreover it is shown that ii there exist pareto optimal allocations that can only be reached through resource conservation and not through competitive markets irrespective of compensating income transfers finally iii equivalence is demonstrated between strict resource conservation and non dictatorship of the present generations over future generations as formalized in chichilnisky s sustainable welfare function the results are shown to hold in both a first best and a second best setting

household energy consumption in rural china historical development present pattern and policy implication abstract household energy consumption in rural areas is strongly related to living standards poverty alleviation air pollution and health but lacks solid analysis due to limited data this paper first presents a systematical overview of rural household energy consumption in china from 1985 to 2013 to quantify and illustrate the pattern of rural household energy consumption we use a comprehensive household survey the chinese residential energy consumption survey crecs 2013 to illustrate the energy consumption by seven types of energy and five types of end use demand moreover we compare the rural household energy consumption in terms of quantity fuel mix and demand structure by north south regions east middle west areas and various countries we identify the biomass still dominate chinese rural household energy supply while cooking and space heating are the most energy intensive demand the overall energy efficiency for a rural household is 33 mainly attributed to the massive use of biomass policy implications are summarized and discussed

entitlements missing markets and environmental uncertainty reply abstract at one level dore and ward seem intent on immunizing received doctrine they say that i did not prove that rights violated nozick s principles of justice and that i did not prove that missing markets were the problem more telling they allege i did not prove that my story was better than the particular story favored by dore and ward that is they argue that there is an alternative approach based on the theory of public economics which is indeed operational 3 they then use the bulk of their comment to explain and defend this alternative model they hope to convince the reader that the model of public economics survives intact in the face of my alternative model to the extent that their model allows one to define the problem away it is not difficult to see why they find it so compelling more seriously dore and ward fail to make a coherent argument about the concept of rights and duties and the logic of a particular rights structure that happens to prevail they seem concerned that my article was tampering with some sacred social construct the status quo rights structure and that my article threatened the received wisdom of both public economics and paretian walrasian bliss indeed theirs seems to be a genuine fear that if economists release their grip on the certitude of received orthodoxy the floodgates will be open to all manner of bumbling regulators seeking to shift rights and wealth positions across generations my article is apparently threatening because it seems to suggest that the received wisdom may at times be misleading

ecosystem services and regional development an application to sweden this study carries out interregional comparisons of development and sustainable use of natural capital with and without inclusion of non marketed ecosystem services a simple dynamic model of an open economy shows that appropriate adjustment of conventional income accounts includes flow and stock components but excludes explicit entrance of pollution calculations are made for swedish regions and for two types of ecosystem services pollution sequestration and recreational services provided by three types of ecosystems forests agricultural landscape and wetlands when comparing the adjusted and non adjusted regional income accounts it is shown that the two measurements generate significantly different pictures of regional income and growth regions that are traditionally considered as relatively less growth promoting are shown to hold important sources of wealth from natural capital while counties that are rich in conventional accounts fall behind when adjusting for values of changes in natural capital

the effects of ageing and an environmental trust fund in an overlapping generations model on carbon emission reductions most currently employed integrated assessment models for climate change are of a dynastic nature they employ the ramsey rule linking the interest rate economic growth and the rate of pure time preference this paper argues that although a dynastic framework might be convenient for economic analysis it is restrictive and can be misleading overlapping generations models which do not employ the ramsey rule are more flexible and may give results different from those derived from dynastic models with the integrated assessment model alice 2 0 it is shown how various assumptions on demographic change and public institutions can affect the interest rate thereby influencing the efficient greenhouse gas emission reductions it is concluded that dynastic integrated assessment models are in many respects inappropriate for providing policy makers with quantitative figures about the costs of carbon dioxide emissions and their desirable reduction levels 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

a review of literature and hypotheses on new technology based firms abstract this paper examines the existing literature on new technology based firms in an attempt to understand how such companies contribute to the vitality of an economy and to see which variables are critical in enabling them to do so from recent research efforts we have drawn together a set of hypotheses and organized them around four central questions 1 what do new firms contribute to the economy 2 what factors contribute to the success of such enterprises 3 in what cultural contexts do new businesses succeed and 4 which government policies are effective in stimulating and supporting new companies we found that existing studies suggest 1 that new technology based firms contribute significantly to an economy in terms of exports employment taxes paid research and development and innovations 2 that the founders of these new businesses tend to have a strong entrepreneurial heritage a development rather research oriented background and a high need to achieve and are young and highly educated 3 that sector differences may be a more important influence on company location than are regional policies and 4 that no one government program has proven itself to be more than marginally successful in stimulating industrial innovation

bioenergy transition in rural china policy options and co benefits abstract this paper reviews the current situation of bioenergy development in china particularly on its relationship to sustainable rural development it argues that the current government strategy investment policy and industrial interest are over emphasized on biomass burning power generation as part of the clean energy development trajectories which may not lead to the most cost effective outcomes in terms of investments resource use and social development objectives it points out that there are large potentials in developing and disseminating household based biomass technologies in rural areas especially with energy efficient modern biomass stoves which can produce far more economic social and environmental benefits than biomass power plants it is a decentralized solution to use renewable energy resources for meeting multi objectives it is suggested that key incentive policies be provided by the government to encourage this technological transition or the leapfrogging from using traditional household stoves towards modern biomass stoves which will lead to a win win situation in global regional and local environmental protection sustainable resource management and related social benefits particularly for the poor in remote communities six policy recommendations are made 1 financial schemes development 2 preferable tax and carbon tax 3 regulatory policy reform 4 service industry support 5 market research training and capacity building for key stakeholders 6 development of methodologies and standards for cdm projects the potential co benefits brought up by this massive biomass technology transition will bring new perspectives to realizing millennium development goals mdgs and global co2 emissions reduction targets in china and also set an example to other developing countries

renewable resources and economic sustainability a dynamic analysis with heterogeneous time preferences abstract in recent years there has been increasing interest in the study of economic sustainability and its relationship with natural resources this paper attempts to shed some light on the issue by taking into account the individual variations in time preferences for consumption and resource amenity we characterize the long run steady state analyze its asymptotic stability and explore the transational dynamics from any initial state the welfare implications of the optimal path are also discussed

science parks and regional innovation performance in fiscal austerity era less is more european financial crisis has raised questions about the sustainability and the contribution of innovation anchors especially in southern european countries such as greece this paper utilizes the concept of regional innovation systems riss and introduces a methodological approach that allows for evaluating an science and technology park s stp contribution into the corresponding ris performance taking into consideration 1 the ris idiosyncrasies 2 the dominant role of government expenditures on r d and 3 the underlying complexity of knowledge production and management under alternative sets of restrictions imposed by fiscal consolidation on the preferences of authorities which design and implement science technology and innovation sti policies our framework relies on the estimation of a multi input multi output latent knowledge production function approach and the corresponding efficiency indices data requirements are sourced from the regional innovation scoreboard for the four greek regions and from a small scale case study with respect to the examined regional stp covering the period from 2000 to 2012 the main empirical findings highlight that the contribution of the examined stp in the corresponding ris performance diminishes alongside with the decrease in gerd investment levels with respect to all the efficiency indices these findings are attributed to the structural characteristics of both the ris and the stp under investigation and capture their dependence on managing public financial resources for sti activities

a bibliometric account of the evolution of ee in the last two decades is ecological economics becoming a post normal science abstract in ecological economics the debate on formalism and formalization has been addressed in the context of a lively discussion on ecological economics as a post normal versus normal science using ecological economics ee as a seed journal and applying bibliometric techniques to all 2533 the articles published in ee from january 1989 to december 2009 we analyze the evolution of the field of ecological economics aiming to shed light on this debate we observe the predominance and increased relevance of certain research topics methodological issues policies governance and institutions and valuation moreover collective action technical change and the environment and values stand as emergent themes of research finally we note that ecological economics experienced an empirical turn reflected in a shift away from exclusively formalized papers towards exclusively empirical and to a larger extent formal and empirical ones the combination of the prominent and emergent topics and the empirical turn mirrors the increasing awareness among researchers in the field of the need to address a key specificity of ecological economics the interdependence of the economic biophysical and social spheres on this basis we argue that at least through the lens of ee ecological economics has evolved towards a post normal science

the rise fall and sustainability of capital resource economies in debates about green accounting it is sometimes argued that a positive value of aggregate investments indicates that an economy is developing sustainably asheim 1994 and pezzey 1994 have shown that this is wrong using a version of the well known dasgupta heal economy with one capital and one non renewable resource stock as a counterexample asheim s proof referred to the unproved assumptions that in such an economy a higher rate of time preference induces higher initial consumption and vice versa and that optimal consumption is initially rising and then falling here we show that these assumptions do hold true under certain circumstances thereby also proving some of dasgupta and heal s other conjectures about sustainability

what is sustainable development this paper introduces two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and characterizes the welfare criterion that they imply the axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role in society s choices over time theorems 1 and 2 show there exist sustainable preferences which satisfy these axioms and provide a full characterization theorems 3 5 study a standard dynamical system representing the growth of a renewable resource economy give a turnpike theorem and exhibit the differences between sustainable optima and the ones according to discounted utilitarianism

how to be an ecological economist abstract to answer the question how to be an ecological economist we must start by defining the field of ecological economics mainstream economics altogether lacks the concepts required to deal adequately with nature justice and time it was the absence of these three concepts in this otherwise great social science that led to the establishment of ecological economics the interest in nature justice and time is its defining characteristic the main thesis of this paper is that our field is a fragile institution and that the professional existence of an ecological economist is no less fragile however this very fragility also represents freedom scope for free thinking conceptualising and research nevertheless to be able to really use and in turn enjoy the full scope of this freedom an ecological economist needs certain specific characteristics in particular what is termed in the german philosophical tradition urteilskraft and in english power of judgement a description of these characteristics is developed in this paper providing an answer to the question how to be an ecological economist

the incremental cost principle and the conservation of globally important habitats a critical examination abstract this paper examines the application of the incremental cost ic principle for the conservation of globally important habitats it first describes the characteristics of the ic and how it became an important financial modality in multilateral conservation efforts the application of the ic is then examined taking into account characteristics of successful collaboration efforts for the global environment the paper finds that as currently applied the ic fails to be a robust financial mechanism for protection of globally important habitats it also heavily skews the bulk of conservation costs from developed to developing countries the paper concludes with a description of suggested changes to make the ic an effective tool in global conservation efforts

energy consumption in rural china a household model for three villages in jiangxi province abstract in china fuelwood and coal are the most important energy sources for rural households in poor areas along with population and economic growth excessive fuelwood collection is a major cause of deforestation burning coal contributes to environmental problems such as air pollution acid rain and greenhouse gas emissions the purpose of this article is to analyze factors determining choice of energy source and labor input into fuelwood collection in poor forest rich regions and to provide policy recommendations on ways to affect these choices to this end a nonseparable household model reflecting choices in labor allocation and energy demand of rural households is estimated from available data for three villages in a poor forest rich region in jiangxi province southeast china innovative aspects of this article are the analyses of factors driving household substitution between forest and non forest fuels and of dissimilarities in household responses under different market access conditions

does poverty constrain deforestation econometric evidence from peru this paper examines the relationship between income and land clearing for households living in tropical forest regions a simple model of the agricultural household that clears land for agriculture is developed to investigate the relationship between lagged income and cleared land holdings analysis of panel data from peru suggests that lagged income is positively correlated with clearing though at a decreasing rate and because of labor market constraints clearing is positively correlated with household labor availability this work suggests that small increases in the incomes of the poorest are unlikely to reduce deforestation in this context

how does the implementation of the policy of electricity substitution influence green economic growth in china abstract to promote the level of electrification reduce environmental pollution and achieve the goal of clean energy usage and green economic growth in china the national development and reform commission and other eight departments jointly issued and implemented the policy of electricity substitution in 2016 electricity substitution aims to replace traditional fossil fuels such as coal and fuel oil with clean electric energy in different fields e g industry transportation and construction and deal with the pollutants at power generation however we still need to find out the exact impact of the policy of electricity substitution on energy saving and emission reduction in this paper we estimate the economically feasible increment of electricity demand according to different classifications in electricity substitution technology furthermore based on the input output model we discuss the relative influence of the policy of lectricity substitution the main conclusions are first the policy of electricity substitution alone is not adequate to reduce the dependence on fossil energy and environmental pollution under china s current power generation structure we should also increase the use of renewable energy second the power sector plays a leading role in stimulating economic output and the increasing electricity consumption due to the policy of electricity substitution can boost the green development of china s economy

the role of small firms in the technology development of china science technology s t is high on the chinese policy agenda and the country aims at becoming an innovation driven economy small firms have been important in technology development in other east asian countries but the situation in chinese small firms has been far less explored we examine how much s t has been accounted for by small firms and how their s t intensity differs across industries and ownership groups we also analyse how various firm characteristics differ over size categories and s t status this study is based on newly processed micro level data provided by the national bureau of statistics with information on a large number of s t indicators for manufacturing firms in china in 2000 and 2004 our results suggest that the role of small firms in chinese s t is similar to that in many other countries they account for a comparably small share of total s t and most small firms are not engaged in any s t however those small firms that do engage in s t tend to be more s t intensive and have a higher output in terms of patents than larger chinese s t firms

the geography of innovation in small and medium sized firms in west germany since the 1980s a more micro economic oriented view has settled the dispute between macro economic theories over the causes of regional development differentiated studies revealed an unequal spatial distribution of r d laboratories and innovating firms and furthermore it was discovered that the innovation behaviour of firms differs between types of regions however these studies still left several questions unanswered

an overlapping generations model of climate economy interactions a numerically calibrated overlapping generations model of climate change and the world economy is examined in this paper in the absence of intergenerational transfers efficient rates of greenhouse gas emissions abatement rise from 16 in the present to 25 in the long run while mean global temperature increases by 7 40c relative to the preindustrial norm a utilitarian optimum which attaches equal weight to each generation s life cycle utility yields abatement rates that rise from 48 to 89 with a long run temperature increase of 3 40c a second best utilitarian path in which intergenerational transfers are by assumption institutionally infeasible also supports stringent abatement measures i introduction the infinitely lived agent framework pioneered by frank ramsey 1928 has emerged as a central structure in the economics of climate change as characterized by ipcc 1996 working group iii climate change occurs when anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases principally carbon dioxide but also chlorofluorocarbons methane nitrous oxide and water vapor contribute to long term increases in mean global temperature potentially disrupting ecological systems and climate dependent production activities the best known study on the economics of this subject is nordhaus 1994 dynamic model of climate and the economy dice which incorporates assumptions regarding the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emissions in a standard one sector growth model in nordhaus analysis a 50 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would reduce gross world output by 0 93 a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations relative to the preindustrial norm which is expected to occur by the middle of the twenty first century would reduce output by

on the economics of sustainability abstract the purpose of this paper is to work toward reconciliation of the neoclassical consumer choice axiom that more is better and the ecological concern that more is not sustainable the key is to divide the desired more into its rival and nonrival components for it is the consumption of rival goods such as plastic that strains the ecosystem in contrast the consumption of nonrival goods such as bird watching leaves little to no footprint while sustainability can be enhanced through changing preferences a menu of taxes subsidies and or vouchers can also motivate greater nonrival consumption and therefore sustainability without reducing consumer welfare

searching for sustainability the poverty of spontaneous order abstract traditional approaches to sustainability rely on models that depend upon judgments of welfare across future generations right prices and some sense as to what future persons will find giving of utility these models both accept the spontaneous order of market processes and rely on that order to derive optimal consumption paths into the future sustainability is however not a problem of divining optimal paths predicated upon right prices rather sustainability to be operational requires a prior constructed order predicated upon rights for future persons and duties for those now living who sit in a position as dictator over the settings and circumstances that will be passed on to future persons rights based approaches to sustainability do not rely upon unknowable preferences of future persons but rather upon an environmental regency in which those now living agree to preserve settings and circumstances for the future this reminds us that the issue of sustainability concerns not how much to preserve but what to preserve

a meta analysis investigation of the direction of the energy gdp causal relationship implications for the growth degrowth dialogue abstract the complex relation between energy use and the economic process has long attracted attention issues such as the scarcity of energy resources energy theory of value degrowth and a growth approaches are closely related to the relationship between energy and development the present study traces the implications of the energy gdp causality dialogue for the context of the growth degrowth debate where the energy development link plays a decisive role in that context the present research investigates the possible existence of a fundamental macro direction of causality between energy use and economic growth that is not influenced by study specific characteristics and events towards this objective we perform a meta analysis that takes into account 158 studies on causality between energy and gdp covering the period 1978 2011 this is the first time to our knowledge that meta analysis has been applied to investigate the direction of the energy and gdp causal relationship the meta analysis results neither support the existence of a fundamental macro direction nor the so called neutrality hypothesis e gdp in the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth

the economic growth debate what some economists have learned but many have not one thing economists should have learned from the economic growth debate is the importance of defining the term growth by growth i mean quantitative increase in the scale of the physical dimensions of the economy i e the rate of flow of matter and energy through the economy from the environment as raw material and back to the environment as waste and the stock of human bodies and artifacts by development i mean the qualitative improvement in the structure design and composition of physical stocks and flows that result from greater knowledge both of technique and of purpose simply put growth is quantitative increase in physical dimensions development is qualitative improvement in non physical characteristics an economy can therefore develop without growing just as the planet earth has developed evolved without growing neoclassical growth models notwithstanding there is good evidence that neither the earth s surface nor the flux of solar energy grows at a rate equal to the rate of interest in fact they seem not to grow at all yet qualitative evolution occurred and continues to occur two general classes of limits to growth in the above defined sense can be further distinguished biophysical limits and ethicosocial limits in both cases it is growth not development that is limited there may or may not exist limits to development but that is another topic standard neoclassical economics was built on the assumption that the economy is far from both limits i e that it is always biophysically possible and ethicosocially desirable for aggregate product to grow as abramowitz l put it echoing pigou

intergenerational equity discounting and the role of cost benefit analysis in evaluating global climate policy when public policies with impacts far into the future are being debated the question inevitably is raised whether cost benefit analysis which discounts future costs and benefits is not biased against future generations and whether if such discounting is appropriate at all a lower rate should be used to avoid such bias the debate on global climate change is no exception this paper sketches and analyses the welfare foundations of cost benefit analysis and from this perspective analyses the role of cost benefit analysis in the climate policy debate particularly with reference to intergenerational effects the paper concludes that the cost benefit criterion cannot provide a definitive basis for deciding whether we should commit to a longer term programme to moderate climate change the issues of intergenerational equity are not that global climate change will significantly lower the gnp of future generations but relate to the possibility of science fiction like changes in the planet that will produce catastrophic effects in the future and the typical way in which the cost benefit problem is posed obscures the basic choices that we should be evaluating

conservationist government policies and intergenerational equity in an overlapping generations model with renewable resources abstract this paper shows that in overlapping generations models incorporating renewable natural resources competition may lead to perpetually declining living standards in environments in which it is technically feasible to achieve intergenerationally equitable distributions of consumption first and second best conservationist government policies are examined these include forced nationalization of the entire stock of natural capital government open market purchases and sales of natural capital taxation of industrial use of resources and subsidies to private investments in natural capital

sustainable development in a post brundtland world not yet two decades after the publication of our common future the world s political and environmental landscape has changed significantly nonetheless we argue that the concept and practice of sustainable development sd as guiding institutional principle as concrete policy goal and as focus of political struggle remains salient in confronting the multiple challenges of this new global order yet how sd is conceptualized and practiced hinges crucially on the willingness of scholars and practitioners to embrace a plurality of epistemological and normative perspectives on sustainability the multiple interpretations and practices associated with the evolving concept of development and efforts to open up a continuum of local to global public spaces to debate and enact a politics of sustainability embracing pluralism provides a way out of the ideological and epistemological straightjackets that deter more cohesive and politically effective interpretations of sd using pluralism as a starting point for the analysis and normative construction of sustainable development we pay particular attention to how an amalgam of ideas from recent work in ecological economics political ecology and the development as freedom literature might advance the sd debate beyond its post brundtland quagmire enhanced levels of ecological degradation vast inequalities in economic opportunities both within and across societies and a fractured set of institutional arrangements for global environmental governance all represent seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a move towards sustainability while these obstacles are significant we suggest how they might be overcome through a reinvigorated set of notions and practices associated with sustainable development one that explicitly examines the linkages between sustainability policies and sustainability politics

temporal and spacial dynamics of bioenergy related co2 emissions and underlying forces analysis in china abstract with increasing attention on energy shortage and global warming bioenergy is a promising alternative energy to mitigate co2 emissions despite the environmental friendly potential a certain quantity of bioenergy related co2 is still emitted in china this paper investigates the temporal dynamics of bioenergy related co2 emissions in 2000 2010 in china and explores the underlying influence factors based on logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi then the core results are verified with a gis based approach from a spacial perspective the results show that four impact factors emission intensity energy structure energy efficiency and economic development have different impacts on bioenergy related co2 emissions of which economic development is the major factor contributing to its increase while energy efficiency is the major determinant for the decline per capita bioenergy related co2 emissions in different areas are verified in accordance with either economic development factor or energy efficiency factor to some extent to achieve the dual purpose of sustainable development and co2 emissions reduction this paper provides a practical policy framework for rural bioenergy and economic development

long term substitutability between environmental and man made goods abstract substitutability between environmental and man made goods plays a major role in the sustainability debate the notion of substitutability covers a continuous spectrum with perfect substitutability at one end and poor substitutability at the other in this paper it is shown that if economic growth sustains a sharp distinction emerges between perfect and poor substitutability without any intermediate interpretation of substitutability if poor substitutability prevails environmental resources will eventually constitute the major part of total consumption value we relate our results to baumol s disease and assess the implications of this phenomenon for the compensation of environmental losses

bioenergy consumption in rural china evidence from a survey in three provinces abstract biomass in the form of crop residues and firewood is a major energy source for rural households in china a survey conducted in the provinces of shanxi zhejiang and guizhou shows that 37 percent of rural households use bioenergy for heating and cooking and that bioenergy accounts for 18 percent of their total energy consumption most of the biomass used for energy is burned in traditional stoves contributing to indoor air pollution in rural homes crop residues also are commonly burned in the fields contributing to the high level of outdoor air pollution in china our econometric analysis of the key determinants of bioenergy use shows that bioenergy consumption falls modestly with income growth increased time required for biomass collection and less farmland hence open burning of some biomass is an optimal choice and is likely to become more of a problem without policy intervention these findings suggest that a more sustainable use of biomass requires policies that promote cleaner more efficient bioenergy combustion technologies and increase the economic value of biomass such that local households can benefit from biomass collection

sustainability constraints versus optimality versus intertemporal concern and axioms versus data sustainable sustained or survivable development are defined here as distinct sustainability constraints on intertemporal distribution in a context which ignores uncertainty environmental and intratemporal concerns such constraints are neither self contradictory nor redundant for they can conflict with maximizing the present value of utility optimality nor inferior since the axioms underlying optimality are ethically arbitrary and refuted by empirical psychological data axiomatic arguments may clarify but cannot resolve debates about intertemporal concerns data suggest that sustainability constraints are not respected and that intertemporal welfare functions containing a preference for sustained improvement may better reflect what bodies politic mean by sustainability

intergenerational resource rights efficiency and social optimality the discipline of economics is generally defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources between competing social objectives given an initial distribution of resources between economic agents how would they behave so as to improve their welfare according to the pareto criterion the agents would exchange commodities until the opportunities for fruitful exchange were fully exhausted and no agent could be made better off without rendering at least one other agent worse off pareto efficiency is a powerful concept in microeconomic analysis provided that the initial distribution of property rights is equitable allocative efficiency gives rise to the best of all possible worlds acknowledging that the assumptions of perfect competition are often violated firms are monopolistic information is incomplete and externalities exist economists have argued for the modification of institutions so that economic reality will conform more closely to the assumptions of the model that yields such gratifying results but microeconomic theory has always maintained that allocative efficiency is in itself insufficient to maximize social welfare bator 1957 a social welfare function is required to discriminate a social optimum among the array of efficient allocations that correspond to alternative assignments of property rights though economists have posited alternative functional forms for the sake of pursuing conceptual arguments welfare functions have remained elusive constructs for well known theoretical and practical reasons consequently a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between questions of efficiency the province of economics and equity the principal focus of ethical and political discourse in resource economics however the line demarcating efficiency and equity is often crossed the term optimal depletion appears regularly where only efficient depletion is meant while political debates about resource exploitation over time are laden with questions of the proper distribution of our natural patrimony between generations resource economists have predominantly espoused particular use rules that guarantee efficiency but overlook potential improvements in social welfare achievable through the reassignment of property rights across generations we document the evolution and current status of the misuse of the term optimal depletion in section ii we develop a simple two generation three period general equilibrium model in section iii to illustrate how alternative distributions of resource rights between generations relate to alternative pareto efficient solutions in section iv we demonstrate how different social welfare functions affect the optimal solution and associated assignment of resource rights between generations

empirical regularities in the poverty environment relationship of rural households evidence from zimbabwe abstract analysis of rural households and environmental resources is beset by inadequate data especially in africa using purpose collected panel data from zimbabwe we demonstrate seven empirical regularities in the rural poverty environment relationship most important environmental resources make a significant contribution to average rural incomes poorer households also depend heavily on these resources which contribute c 40 to their incomes richer households however use greater quantities of environmental resources in total finally considerable differentiation exists in the economic characteristics of environmental goods these results demonstrate the considerable economic significance of environmental resources to rural households surveys which ignore them miscalculate rural incomes and welfare

factors governing the development of high tech industry agglomerations a tale of three cities glasmeier a 1988 factors governing the development of high tech industry agglomerations a tale of three cities reg studies 22 287 301 high tech industries are thought to precipitate structural change in local economies through the creation of backward and forward linkages and new firm spinoffs case studies of high tech firms and products indicate interindustry linkage development is closely associated with product type and organizational structure of firms three product configurations one of a kind customized and standardized generate differing levels of linkage and spinoff potential firms producing customized products with highly variable input structures and established subcontracting relationships are more amenable to linkage and spinoff creation than firms producing one of a kind or standardized products the potential for linked industry development is further diluted because the spatial expansion path of high tech firms has been through the creation of technical branch plants which a

research on china s rural household energy consumption household investigation of typical counties in 8 economic zones abstract rural household energy consumption is an important component of national energy consumption and plays an important role in rural social and ecological environment developments in this paper energy consumption of 1440 households in 8 typical counties of 8 china s economic zones was investigated the investigation data analysis revealed significant difference of different economic zones in rural household energy consumption level and structure for 8 studying counties the annual average energy consumption per capita was 26 7 gj 10 4 gj the lowest shanghang county and 86 6 gj the highest shulan county in energy consumption straw biogas fuel wood and electricity accounted for 44 33 23 13 12 79 and 9 61 respectively rural families with high incomes preferred commercial energies e g electricity and liquefied petroleum gas lpg to biomass energy e g straw and fuel wood the traditional biomass energy is still the main energy source for china s rural household research results provide references to understand current situations and future development of china s rural household energy consumption and formulate related energy and environmental policies

fairness stewardship and sustainable development abstract the welfare economic concept of fairness offers an attractive axiomatic foundation for the popular notion of stewardship fairness emphasizes the ex ante equal standing of all persons across and within generations this highlights the inextracability of poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability especially in the agrarian tropics where biodiversity loss deforestation and desertification are growing global concerns

a characterization of sustainability with indicators abstract economists favor the use of criteria to characterize sustainability in practice policy makers use indicators i e measurements based on the current economic state and decisions representing given sustainability issues in this paper i introduce a criterion characterizing sustainability with indicators and thresholds acting as constraints i interpret the thresholds as minimal rights to be guaranteed to all generations and define sustainable trajectories as those satisfying all the constraints at all times the new criterion is a generalized maximin criterion the approach is applied to a simple production consumption economy with non renewable resources to derive some policy recommendations on the use of indicators to deal with sustainability i discuss the implications of such a criterion in terms of trade off between sustainability thresholds efficiency and time consistency in particular the resulting problem is time inconsistent and sustainability thresholds may be revised over time following the time inconsistent policy based on indicators with dynamic revision of the thresholds may however result in a sustained utility path and even in utility growth