a resilience perspective of the seea abstract while the seea is an important advance in national accounting it remains deficient in a number of ways in regard to natural resources the dynamic and interactive nature of ecosystems means that any linear compartmentalised system of accounting will miss significant changes that influence human wellbeing in particular losses in resilience of critical capital stocks through changes in underlying ecosystem variables that do not contribute directly to valued flows and are therefore not included in the accounts means that the accounts will not recognise that such stocks are becoming riskier likely to collapse and are therefore over valued we present a stock based approach to measuring sustainable development the inclusive wealth approach of arrow kj dasgupta p and maler k g 2003 evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies environmental and resource economics 26 647 685 at a regional scale using an example from south east australia which includes an assessment of the resilience of critical capital stocks

ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty strong sustainability according to the common definition requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately yet in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed to therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner we propose to use the concept of viability viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability we develop a unifying and general ecological economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases it provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under a mild form of uncertainty and for medium spatial and temporal scales we illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi arid rangelands publication ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty available from https www researchgate net publication 46490456 ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty accessed apr 3 2017

the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program conducted in 2002 in tonga the study observed the impact of migration lottery program on the remaining household members of tongan emigrants on the individual and intra household level income falls rapidly by 22 to 25 percent with a rise in remittances failing to offset a large fall in labor earnings ownership of livestock durable and access to financial services is lower for the remaining household members diets change to be less nutritious and more rice and root crops immigration has a negative impact on household size there is no significant impact of migration on labor supply for men nor women funding for the study derived from the world bank stanford university the waikato management school and mardsen fund

remittances schooling and child labor in mexico abstract this paper studies the effects of remittances from the u s on child labor and school attendance in recipient mexican households we identify these effects using the impact of the 2008 2009 u s recession on remittance receipts the methodology employed is a differences in differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never recipient households to avoid possible selection problems we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group we find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance

national accounting and the valuation of ecosystem assets and their services there has long been interest in integrating the value of environmental stocks and flows into standard measures of economic activity and wealth in particular through the development of adjusted measures of gdp and extended measures of national wealth this paper examines how the valuation of ecosystem services and ecosystem assets can be undertaken in an integrated national accounting setting we clarify the relevant valuation principles most significantly the need to apply the concept of exchange values and explain why the integration of ecosystem services necessitates an extension of the standard production boundary used in economic measurement the main implications of an accounting approach are discussed including the need to distinguish benefits from services the need for valuation methods that exclude consumer surplus and the importance of aligning measures of income and degradation remaining challenges include the treatment of low or negative rents accounting for ecosystem disservices and the derivation of values for ecosystem assets meeting these challenges and advancing work in this area should be the joint focus of economists ecologists and accountants

the irreversibility effect in environmental decisionmaking we provide a new more general definition for the irreversibility effect and demonstrate its relevance to problems involving environmental and other decisions under uncertainty we establish several analytical and numerical results that suggest both that the effect holds more widely than generally recognized and that an existing result epstein s theorem giving a sufficient condition for determining whether the effect holds can be applied more widely than previously indicated in particular to problems involving intertemporally nonseparable benefit functions we further show that a low elasticity of intertemporal substitution will however result in failure of the effect

recent advances in the valuation of ecosystem services and biodiversity recent interest in the economics of biodiversity and wider ecosystem services has been given empirical expression through a focus upon economic valuation this emphasis has been prompted by a growing recognition that the benefits and opportunity costs associated with such services are frequently given cursory consideration in policy analyses or even completely ignored the valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is therefore increasingly seen as a crucial element of robust decision making and this has been reflected in a growing body of related research we provide a critical review of some of this research considering the valuation methods applied to date and focussing upon their limitations in respect to certain categories of ecosystem services particularly cultural services and the applicability of the extant literature to new settings substantial questions also remain at the interface of natural science and economics and we consider the potential contribution of the conceptualization of ecosystems as assets as a response to this challenge as part of this review we also highlight the role which large scale ecosystem assessments have played as an impetus to extending the valuation evidence base and the way in which frameworks and assessments of how ecosystems contribute to human wellbeing might be translated into policy thinking and decision analyses

comprehensive nnp social welfare and the rate of return we show that growth in nnp measured in constant prices indicates welfare improvement provided that an observable rate of return measure is positive this is an alternative welfare interpretation of growth in comprehensive nnp compared with that of asheim and weitzman asheim b g weitzman m l 2001 does nnp growth indicate welfare improvement economic letters 73 233 239 which is based on a divisia consumer price index

the economics of forced migration abstract this article reviews the economics literature on the impacts of forced migration the literature is divided into two parts impacts on forced migrants and impacts on host communities studies exploring the impact of forced migration due to wwii suggest that the long term impact is often positive the literature for developing countries suggests that there are serious consequences of forced migration for those forced to migrate these consequences range from worse labour market outcomes to less consumption smoothing the impact on host communities seems to be mixed and there are winners and losers the article provides suggestions for future research

voracious transformation of a common natural resource into productive capital i analyze a power struggle where competing factions have private financial assets and deplete a common stock of natural resources with no private property rights i obtain a feedback nash equilibrium to the dynamic common pool problem and obtain political variants of the hotelling depletion rule and the hartwick saving rule resource prices and depletion occur too fast so substitution away from resources to capital occurs too fast and the saving rate is too high the power struggle boosts output but depresses sustainable consumption genuine saving is nevertheless zero in a fractionalized society world bank estimates may be too optimistic

a long view of real rates in light of the large and sustained rise in real interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s this paper reviews i the theoretical discussion on the determination of nominal and real interest rates ii the factors determining real interest rates and iii problems of defining and measuring the real rate we go on to examine the historical record of real interest rates in france germany the uk and the usa since 1875 we find that high real rates since 1980 seem to be a return to a long run norm and it is the period from the second world war to 1979 that represents a more natural period in which to investigate an abrupt change of behaviour for real interest rates copyright 1999 by oxford university press

identifying fiscal policy in effectiveness from the differential counter cyclicality of government spending in the interwar period differences across decades in the counter cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession we study government spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries there are two main findings first surprisingly government spending was less counter cyclical in the 1930s than in the 1920s second the growth of government spending did not have a significant effect on output growth so that there is little evidence that this feature of fiscal policy played a stabilizing role in the interwar period resume identifier le caractere effectif ou non de la politique fiscale a partir de la contra cyclicite differentielle des depenses gouvernementales pendant l entre deux guerres des differences dans le degre de contra cyclicite de la politique budgetaire peuvent servir a identifier si la croissance des depenses publiques a un effet sur la croissance de l output et accelere ainsi la reprise de l activite suivant une recession nous etudions des fonctions de reaction des depenses publiques pour les annees 1920 et 1930 ce pour vingt pays il en ressort deux resultats principaux premierement et fait surprenant les depenses publiques etaient moins contra cycliques durant les annees 1930 que 1920 deuxiemement la croissance des depenses publiques n a pas eu d effet significatif sur la croissance de l output ce qui permet de douter que cet aspect de la politique budgetaire ait joue un role stabilisateur durant l entre guerre

more than total economic value how to combine economic valuation of biodiversity with ecological resilience abstract the assessment of total economic value has become a pragmatic and popular approach in nature valuation yet criticisms have been raised one major point of critique is that total economic value bases the monetary value of ecosystems purely on the flow of human benefits of services of ecosystems and consequently ignores questions of sustainable use of natural capital per se this paper explains why total economic value by itself is in principle an inadequate concept to guide sustainable use of ecosystems and gives an overview of essential ecological theory that needs to be taken into account in addition to total economic value to fully include ecosystem sustainability the paper concludes with a framework for combining ecological theory with economic valuation the key elements here are theoretical ecological insights about ecosystem resilience and portfolio theory which offers an economic perspective on investment in biodiversity portfolio theory puts total economic value in a framework where investment in biodiversity is expanded to cover functional diversity and mobile link species in order to maintain ecosystem resilience and so fosters sustainable use of ecosystems

wealth as a criterion for sustainable development in this article the authors define sustainable development as an economic programme along which social well being does not decline over time it can be shown that the requirement is equivalent to the maintenance of a comprehensive measure of wealth where an economy s wealth is defined to be the social worth of its entire array of capital assets including natural capital using data published by the world bank on the world s poorest regions countries which would be regarded as having performed well if judged on the basis of such indices as gnp per head or the human development index are found to have grown poorer a few alarmingly so

northwest coast indigenous institutions that supported resilience and sustainability abstract indians of the northwest coast of north america had cultural continuity for at least two millennia before contact with people from the old world this archeological fact suggests that their societies had achieved sustainability and resilience in relationships to their ecosystems and the salmon runs the governance principles used by northwest indians in managing fisheries and other resources provided resilience in addition to a land ethic these principles included exchange systems based on public reciprocity property rights were clear and trespass was a capital offense chiefs and titleholders had to be generous facilitators leadership authority over land was contingent upon adherence to ethical and generous behavior as well as good management these indigenous institutions were quite different from the rules currently governing the management of most ecosystems in critiquing current institutions many ideas similar to those in the indigenous systems have been proposed in isolation the example described in this paper suggests the importance of combining them

winners and losers among a refugee hosting population abstractthe impact of a sudden mass influx of forced migrants on the hosting economy is understudied and not well understood using a household panel data set for the kagera region in tanzania we test the impact of the mass refugee presence on the welfare of the local population our identification strategy exploits variations in the timing of arrival as well as the spatial distribution of rwandese and burundi refugees we find a positive and aggregate effect but households are affected differently depending on their main initial occupation

resilience in the dynamics of economy environment systems the ecological concept of resilience has begun to inform analysis of change in economy environment systems the linkages between resilience and the stability of dynamical systems are discussed along with its role in understanding of the evolution of such systems particular linkages discussed include those between resilience biodiversity and the sustainability of alternative states recent developments in modelling the resilience of joint economy environment systems suggest the advantages of analysing change in the system as a markov process the transition probabilities between states offering a natural measure of the resilience of the system in such states it is argued that this emergent property of the collaboration between ecology and economics has far reaching implications for the way we think about model and manage the environmental sustainability of economic development

a framework for the practical application of the concepts of critical natural capital and strong sustainability this paper develops a methodology for identifying that natural capital called critical natural capital cnc the maintenance of which is essential for environmental sustainability by consideration of the characteristics of natural capital of the environmental functions that these characteristics enable natural capital to perform and of the importance of these functions to humans and the biosphere it shows how sustainability standards in respect of these environmental functions may be derived the difference between the current situation and these standards is termed the sustainability gap the methodology that emerges from bringing these ideas together into a single analytical framework enables policy makers to identify the extent of current unsustainability the principal causes of it the elements and processes of natural capital the cnc which need to be maintained or restored to close the sustainability gap and the costs of so doing the framework should therefore be of use in identifying priorities and policies for moving towards environmental sustainability

implementing carbon credits for forests based on green accounting abstract this paper presents a carbon accounting method for forests that is implementable in the sense that it makes use of observable information the valuation of the effects of carbon dioxide is based on asset values rather than rental values with minor differences due to the treatment of such accidents as fires and pestilence the method corresponds to the flow method of the physical carbon accounting literature the stock change method of carbon accounting however is incompatible with economic principles rather than set carbon values to their optimal levels in the pigovian tradition we use current societal standards we also present a discussion of how to implement the scheme in the face of uncertainty

policy reform shadow prices and market prices how should public projects and policy reforms be assessed when market prices give misleading signals revenues and costs at market prices then give distorted measures of social gains and losses and our appraisal should use social opportunity costs or shadow prices we show how shadow prices may be integrated into an analysis of policy reform demonstrate the critical dependence of these prices on government policy and analyse their relations with market prices the model allows for a wide range of sources of impairment of price signals we also discuss key issues in the analysis of price reform and privatisation

the net national product and exhaustible resources the effects of foreign trade abstract it is the widely held view that estimates of national income should be corrected for the value of the extracted exhaustible resource stock this correction implies the counter intuitive result that the national income of an oil producer is unaffected by its vast oil reserves in this paper we review the definition of national income and discuss its relation to national welfare we show that an extra income should be imputed to the resource owning country based on the exportable resource stock part of the net adjustment for resource use is made to the income of the resource using and not the resource producing country

assessing the direct and spillover effects of shocks to refugee remittances abstract we examine the impact of exogenously shutting down remittances to kakuma refugee camp in northern kenya during 2015 we find that the remittance shutdown did not reduce refugee consumption on average however it did decrease consumption of households that previously received remittances through the networks that were closed while simultaneously increasing consumption for those who continued to receive remittances through other mechanisms the shutdown also resulted in decreases in the probability of consuming a variety of goods by the host population particularly those with livelihoods linked to the refugee camp these findings underscore the tight links between refugee camps and surrounding communities and are a testament to the multiplier effects of remittances

from great depression to great credit crisis similarities differences and lessons the great depression of the 1930s and the great credit crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses while it remains too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy it is possible to analyse monetary and fiscal responses in the 1930s as a natural experiment or counterfactual capable of shedding light on the impact of current policies we employ vector autoregressions instrumental variables and qualitative evidence for 27 countries in the period 1925 39 the results suggest that monetary and fiscal stimulus was effective that where it did not make a difference it was not tried they shed light on the debate over fiscal multipliers in episodes of financial crisis they are consistent with multipliers at the higher end of those estimated in the recent literature and with the argument that the impact of fiscal stimulus will be greater when banking systems are dysfunctional and monetary policy is constrained by the zero bound miguel almunia agustin benetrix barry eichengreen kevin h o rourke and gisela rua

the role of technological progress in testing adjusted net savings evidence from oecd countries abstract in this paper we investigate the relationship between comprehensive measures of savings and changes in future consumption in oecd countries this relationship is at the basis of the interpretation of adjusted net savings as a weak sustainability indicator and so evidence of its validity provides support to the use of this indicator we construct various measures of comprehensive savings for 20 oecd countries to include depletion from non renewable resources human capital investment and technological progress given their importance especially for rich countries we focus on the role of technical progress and human capital in the form of changes in education level we do not find strong evidence in favor of including green adjustments in the conventional net savings however we find compelling evidence for the inclusion of technological progress since this involves a forward looking term the above result suggests that to construct an indicator of weak sustainability from conventional net savings some estimate of future technological progress is needed

the cost of natural capital consumption accounting for a sustainable world economy abstract the system for integrated environmental and economic accounting seea has been criticized in this journal for ignoring the benefits of ecosystem services for human well being this paper argues that extended national accounts should not attempt measuring economic welfare rather they could and should assess the environmental sustainability of economic activity as the cost of natural capital consumption the global application of seea concepts and methods demonstrates the feasibility of international green accounting for the world economy sustainability costs run to about 3 trillion us or 6 of world gdp large variations at national and regional levels suggest that conventional economic indicators may significantly overstate economic progress in some parts of the world data gaps and lack of data comparability affect these first estimates national and international statistical services should be more aggressive in greening the national accounts more prudent and more sustainable economic policies might be the result

incorporating resilience in the assessment of inclusive wealth an example from south east australia this paper explores the consequences of changes in a system s resilience on the sustainability of resource allocation decisions as measured by inclusive wealth iw arrow et al in environ resour econ 26 647 685 2003 we incorporate an estimate of resilience in iw by taking account of known or suspected thresholds that can lead to irreversible or practically irreversible changes in the productivity and value of assets and hence social welfare these thresholds allow us to identify policies or projects that may be leading to an increased risk of decline in capital stocks the wealth of the region such risks are not reflected through usual measures of current system performance e g agricultural production we use the goulburn broken catchment in south eastern australia as a case study to explore the significance and practicality of including resilience in inclusive wealth estimates

global welfare comparisons to provide a normative foundation for transfers between dierent economies one needs information on their per capita welfare this paper considers various methods for doing this and reaches the following main conclusions i such global welfare comparisons are more demanding than usually thought ii the ranking of methods diers from that of local e g over time comparisons with real comprehensive per capita nnp being the least impractical method the lesson is that global welfare comparisons should be performed with great care the comparisons must be made in local real prices calculated according to purchasingpower parity where non traded environmental amenities play an important role

backward and forward looking shadow prices in inclusive wealth accounting an example of renewable energy capital abstract attaching weights to the list of capital assets is crucial in inclusive wealth accounting and sustainability assessments these weights or shadow prices can be constructed in theory by looking prospectively at future social profits that the capital in question is expected to yield in practice however both backward and forward looking shadow prices are used this study confirms that these two approaches are theoretically equivalent under strong assumptions and reviews how and why the two approaches are taken the two approaches are then applied to renewable energy capital rec which has rarely been done in either produced or natural capital accounting and sustainability assessments renewable energy capital provides an ideal example with which to compare the two approaches as it is a class of produced capital that substitutes both produced and natural capital the numerical results of both approaches demonstrate that renewable energy capital starts to account for as large a share as natural capital does if not produced capital or inclusive wealth in those countries where natural capital is poorly endowed and investment in renewable energy capital has been witnessed

the economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience abstract ecosystem resilience i e an ecosystem s ability to maintain its basic functions and controls under disturbances is often interpreted as insurance by decreasing the probability of future drops in the provision of ecosystem services resilience insures risk averse ecosystem users against potential welfare losses using a general and stringent definition of insurance and a simple ecological economic model we derive the marginal economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience and study how it depends on ecosystem properties economic context and the ecosystem user s risk preferences we show that i the insurance value of resilience is negative positive for low high levels of resilience ii it increases with the level of resilience and iii it is one additive component of the overall always positive economic value of resilience

lessons from the 1930s great depression this paper provides a survey of the great depression comprising both a narrative account and a detailed review of the empirical evidence focusing especially on the experience of the united states we examine the reasons for and flawed resolution of the american banking crisis as well as the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy we also consider the pivotal role of the gold standard in the international transmission of the slump and leaving gold as a route to recovery policy lessons for today from the great depression are discussed as are some implications for macroeconomics

nature in economics nature has been ill served by 20th century economics when asked economists acknowledge nature s existence but most would appear to deny that she is worth much if ecologists worry about the contemporary nexus between population size and growth the standard of living and the natural environment we economists point to the accumulation of capital and technological progress and say malthus got it wrong in this paper i show by an appeal to theory that economics has been so badly misused that it has deflected attention from deep problems at the nexus that are faced both regionally and globally

using the fisherian concept of income to guide a nation s transition to a steady state economy abstract many ecological economists have long been advocating that industrialised nations should abandon their growth predilection and initiate the transition to a steady state economy to demonstrate how a nation s transition to a steady state economy might be usefully guided fisherian national income one of the best known indicators of sustainable economic welfare is calculated for australia for the period 1967 1997 also calculated for the study period is the changing physical scale of the australian economy by juxtaposing per capita fisherian income and the growth of the australian economy it is shown that australia surpassed its optimal macroeconomic scale in the mid 1970s while around this time australia began a transition to a lower rate of growth that arrested the steep decline in per capita fisherian income australia had reverted back to a high growth policy by the end of the study period it chose not to continue the deceleration towards a steady state economy a policy stance that is likely to be detrimental to the sustainable economic welfare enjoyed by the average australian

clarifying protected and utilitarian values of critical capital abstract sustainable development may be defined as a non declining value of capital stocks social natural built and human over time the ability for substitution between and within each stock over time has been widely debated resulting in the identification and then preservation of critical capital stocks we propose that critical can be defined from two ethical perspectives teleological or consequentialist goal or ends based and deontological moral duty and rule based the consequential ethic ensures critical capitals are utilitarian in value and they generate goods and services for the maintenance of human wellbeing whilst deontologically critical capital depends on culturally and psychologically protected values which may vary locally or at least as for e g biodiversity be open to conflicting opinions this separation in the basis for defining critical capital stocks leads to awareness that some tradeoffs between critical capital stocks may be irreconcilable or likely to lead to outrage a framework is developed to guide practitioners as to how to identify critical capital stocks using both protected and utilitarian values examples show that protected values are likely to be specific to community ethnic religious cultural etc and require different methods for resolving substitutability of capital stocks to achieve sustainable development

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

available capital utilized capital and shadow prices in inclusive wealth accounting abstract previously accounting for comprehensive or inclusive wealth has focused on the supply side of capital assets however human well being created by capital assets inherently depends on the demand side as well in particular if capital is not utilized at its full capacity then realized or actual human well being may be less affected by available capital than by effective or utilized capital in principle this notion is embodied in a shadow price which is defined as the marginal contribution of capital assets to social well being the shadow price becomes higher if the underlying resource allocation mechanism improves in practice one can account for such underutilization by adjusting shadow prices to reflect only the utilized quantity of the capital in question furthermore capital utilization has different nuanced implications for produced human and natural capital and its implications even vary across some classes of natural capital within this line of theoretical thought we provide empirical estimates of the changes in inclusive wealth and sustainability of selected developing countries in recent years by comparing available and utilized capital assets we find that sustainability assessments may be revised based on utilized capital due to among others human capital underemployment and non renewable natural capital accessibility

golden fetters the gold standard and the great depression barry eichengreen oxford university press new york 1992 pp xix 448 39 95

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

the welfare economic theory of green national accounts this paper takes a critical look at the literature on green national accounts the problem studied is to find a linear index of economic variables that responds to perturbations in the same direction as social well being the thesis of a large literature that net national product which is a flow is that index in closed economies is shown in some interpretations to be simply false and in others to suffer from deep estimation problems it is argued that capital depreciation using shadow prices should certainly be included in national accounts but that the right welfare index is a comprehensive measure of wealth defined as the shadow value of an economy s stock of all capital assets it is shown that comprehensive wealth is usable as a criterion for policy evaluation as well as for determining sustainable economic development

validity of sustainability framework for china s mining cities a structural equation modelling approach abstractmany studies developed their framework for sustainability through indicator systems but the interactions and relationships within these indicators have not been studied yet in this article based on indicator systems we use a sample of 78 mining cities in china and employ structural equation modelling sem method to explore the validity of sustainability framework our empirical results show that resources abundance positively affects urbanization level significantly but negatively affects cleaner production level and environmental protection level significantly economic strength positively affects urbanization level significantly cleaner production level has a significant effect on economic strength and non mineral resources conversion efficiency we also find that when economic strength is low resources abundance might weaken the positive effect of economy on urbanization

do we need ecosystem accounts the internationally adopted system of environmental economic accounting measures the interaction between the economy and the natural environment its central framework accounts for the depletion of natural resources but omits environmental degradation notably from pollution a recent companion volume on experimental ecosystem accounting addresses ecosystem degradation but excludes the depletion of natural assets its physical accounts notably on land cover and use could support the management and conservation of ecosystems policies of sustainable economic performance and growth require however integrative information on both depletion and degradation at national and sectoral levels integrated environmental and economic accounts can provide this information without the detour of ecosystem accounting

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

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

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

why do migrants return to poor countries evidence from philippine migrants responses to exchange rate shocks abstract this paper distinguishes between target earnings and life cycle motivations for return migration by examining how philippine migrants return decisions respond to major unexpected exchange rate changes in their overseas locations due to the asian financial crisis overall the evidence favors the life cycle explanation more favorable exchange rate shocks lead to fewer migrant returns a10 improvement in the exchange rate reduces the 12 month return rate by 1 4 percentage points however some migrants appear motivated by target earnings considerations in households with intermediate foreign earnings favorable exchange rate shocks have the least effect on return migration but lead to increases in household investment

the economics of non convex ecosystems introduction the word convexity is ubiquitous in economics but absent from economics in this paper we explain why and show what difference it makes to economic analysis if ecosystem non convexities are taken seriously a simple proof is provided of the connection between self similarity and power laws we also provide an introduction to each of the papers in the symposium and draw out the way in which they form a linked set of contributions

us monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s the paper provides a survey of fiscal and monetary policies during the 1930s under the hoover and roosevelt administrations and how they influenced the policies during the recent great recession the discussion of the causal impacts of monetary policy focuses on papers written in the last decade and the findings of scholars using dynamic structural general equilibrium modelling the discussion of fiscal policy shows why economists do not see the new deal as a keynesian stimulus describes the significant shift toward excise taxation during the 1930s and surveys estimates of the impact of federal spending on local economies the paper concludes with discussion of the lessons for the present from 1930s monetary and fiscal policy

regime shifts and management regime shifts are substantial reorganizations in system structure functions and feedbacks which can lead to changes in the provision of ecosystem services with significant impacts on human well being recent research has documented cases of regime shifts in local and regional systems and there is mounting concern about regime shifts of global significance in this paper we discuss management of social ecological systems in light of the potential for regime shift management that increases system resilience and lowers the probability of regime shifts is beneficial when regime shifts are likely to reduce human well being it may not always be possible to avoid harmful regime shifts so building capacity to adapt should a regime shift occur is beneficial too adaptive management can help reduce uncertainty about the likelihood of regime shifts how this likelihood can be affected by management action and the impact of regime shifts on well being linking scientific understanding with decision making is important but distributional consequences can impede decision making and action

british monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s current economic turbulence has revived interest in interwar macroeconomic instability and policy this paper provides a guide to the current state of knowledge on british macroeconomic policy between 1929 and the eve of the second world war for today s economists and policy makers mindful that some will seek lessons from this earlier age it makes clear the very particular economic and policy context of the time including the marked difference between british and american economic performance and policies and the challenge posed by the massive rise in debt brought about by the first world war knowledge transfer is possible here for policy learning but what transpires is that lessons are typically stronger as negatives than as positives namely what should not be done in general as against what might be done this largely situation specific the focus is the role and effectiveness of the monetary and fiscal policies pursued together with an assessment of the principal policy not adopted namely the keynesian solution of significant loan financed public works to remedy mass unemployment the analysis is comparative with respect to us macroeconomic economic performance and policy it explores the different macroeconomic shocks of the contraction phase the term great depression is not really appropriate to the british experience in the two countries comparative policy regimes and then in turn analyses the policy mix and policy effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy including for britain the counterfactual keynesian solution a business cycle periodization is adopted with the key role for the abandonment of the gold standard in terms of regaining freedom of choice in macroeconomic policy itself experiencing significant developments after 1931 the traditional role of the cheap money induced housing boom in britain s post 1932 economic recovery is reaffirmed the impact of the fiscal policies actually pursued are then discussed as are assessments of the likely effectiveness of the keynesian solution had the 1929 liberal party s we can conquer unemployment spending package been implemented

green accounting in imperfect market economies the idea of measuring the national welfare level by using the green nnp net national product has gained much attention lately this paper summarizes the research on social accounting in imperfect market economies by putting the results into a unified framework the main contribution of the paper is to relate the form of the national welfare measure to the functioning of the economic system and therefore to explicitly address the informational requirements implicit in social accounting

macroeconomic policy in light of the credit crunch the return of counter cyclical fiscal policy this paper begins by arguing that the 2007 8 credit crunch does not require a fundamental reevaluation of monetary policy the crunch occurred because regulation was too lax and we need to develop new and more effective tools of regulatory control to focus on current account imbalances or mistakes in setting interest rates as a prime cause of the credit crunch is unconvincing and has the danger of diverting attention away from the need to increase financial regulation the current recession does require a re evaluation of the role fiscal policy can play when interest rates hit a zero bound an expansionary fiscal policy is required because monetary policy makers are reluctant to promise higher future inflation and the impact of quantitative easing is likely to be small although rising debt may place a limit on how much conventional fiscal policy can do not all expansionary fiscal measures require additional borrowing there are two important lessons for the future first although monetary policy should remain the primary tool to stabilize the business cycle the combination of fiscal implementation lags and uncertainty means that some precautionary fiscal action may be appropriate during the early phase of some economic downturns second to play this backstop stabilization role effectively a policy that results in the government debt to gdp ratio declining albeit gradually and erratically in normal times seems appropriate

evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies we are interested in three related questions 1 how should accounting prices be estimated 2 how should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy 3 how can we check whether intergenerational well being will be sustained along a projected economic programme we do not presume that the economy is convex nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens we show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained we also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth computed in terms of the accounting prices can be used as an index for problems 2 and 3 above the remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources transacted in a few well known economic institutions

the great crash and the onset of the great depression this paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in october 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income which led consumers to forgo purchases of durable goods that the great crash generated uncertainty is evidenced by the decline in surety expressed by contemporary forecasters that this uncertainty affected consumer behavior is shown by the fact that spending on consumer durables declined drastically in late 1929 while spending on perishable goods rose slightly this effect is confirmed by the fact that there is a significant negative relationship between stock market variability and the production of consumer durables in the prewar era

a distributional argument for supply side climate policies this paper presents a distributional argument for the use of supply side climate policies whereby carbon emissions are controlled through i depletion quotas or ii permanent confiscation of a fraction of the in situ carbon stocks the modeling considers intertemporal competitive equilibria in the cobb douglas version of the dasgupta heal solow stiglitz model of capital accumulation and costless resource extraction it is shown how policies i and ii preserve the functional distribution of income between capital owners and resource owners compared to the case where no climate policy is needed while suggested demand side policies do not such observations are of interest as avoiding functional redistribution may facilitate climate change negotiations the paper discusses policy implications of the analysis outside the simplified setting of the stylized model

are we consuming too much this paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive we consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness or insufficiency of current consumption one is an intertemporal utility maximization criterion actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility the other is a sustainability criterion which requires that current consumption be consistent with non declining living standards over time we extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change in applying this formula we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion in these regions genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital

maximin viability and sustainability the maximin criterion defines the highest utility level that can be sustained in an intergenerational equity perspective the viability approach makes it possible to characterize all the economic trajectories sustaining a given not necessarily maximal utility level in this paper we exhibit the strong links between maximin and viability we show that the value function of the maximin problem can be obtained in the viability framework and that the maximin path is a particular viable path this result allows us to extend the recommendations of the maximin approach beyond optimality to characterize the sustainability of economic trajectories which differ from the maximin path attention is especially paid to non negative net investment at maximin accounting prices which is shown to be necessary to maintain the productive capacity of the economy whether the development path is optimal or not our results provide a new theoretical ground to account for sustainability in imperfect economies based on maximin prices

wealth natural capital and sustainable development contrasting examples from botswana and namibia theoretical work has demonstrated that sustainable development requires non declining per capita wealth where wealth is defined to include produced natural human and social capital several studies have attempted to measure total national wealth or changes in wealth but have been seriously hampered by a lack of data especially for natural and human capital to address this problem the un and other international statistical agencies developed a standardized framework for environmental accounts the system of integrated environmental and economic accounts seea using the newly available asset accounts for natural capital national wealth accounts are constructed and used to assess the contrasting development paths of botswana and namibia botswana with an explicit policy of reinvestment of resource rents has roughly tripled per capita wealth and national income over the past two decades namibia with no explicit policy to use natural capita to build wealth has seen per capita wealth and income decline

capital gains and net national product in open economies it is shown within a given framework that with the world economy following an egalitarian path the aggregate capital gains being positive is equivalent to the interest rate tending to decrease this result is of importance for the concept of net national product in open economies in particular with positive aggregate capital gains an open economy cannot sustain consuming the return on its capital stocks since some part of the return must be used to augment the country s national wealth it is established that a country s share of world wide sustainable consumption equals its share of worldwide wealth

on the origins of the state stationary bandits and taxation in eastern congo a positive demand shock for coltan a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines where they settle as stat

resource depletion and sustainability in small open economies abstract exogenous price changes affect the amount that a small country exporting natural resource commodities must invest to sustain its consumption level the necessary amount is given by the difference between hotelling rent and the discounted sum of future terms of trade effects capital gains the latter term is found to be large relative to the former in the case of petroleum depletion in indonesia this suggests that resource rich countries will need to invest more than previously expected to sustain their consumption levels if natural resource prices continue their long term historical decline

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

sustainability in uncertain economies a stochastic growth model with a list of capital assets i e reproducible capital non renewable resources the knowledge base and institutions is studied to evaluate the effects of different sources of uncertainty on sustainability it is also discussed which measure can serve as an index of intergenerational welfare to evaluate sustainable development under uncertainty the aim is to consider a more comprehensive setting than is usually explored in the literature and to generalize arrow dasgupta and maler results to the case of uncertainty

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

sustainable development and resilience in ecosystems two new important developments in environmental and resource economics is presented non convex dynamics of ecosystems and wealth as an indicator of sustainable development non convex dynamics imply existence of resilience that is the robustness of systems to withstand exogenous perturbations resilience can be regarded as an insurance against flips of the system into different basins of stability sustainable development according to the bruntland report is the provision of productive resources to future generations to make it possible for them to live as well as the present generation thus the value of changes in productive assets is therefore an index of whether an economy is on a sustainable path or not resilience can be regarded as one such productive asset and the paper discusses how one can define the value of this asset

ethics of the discount rate in the stern review on the economics of climate change any comparison of the costs and benefits of climate change is dominated by the chosen discount rate but although the stern review emphasises the ethical nature of the parameters entering into its choice of a relatively low discount rate its discussion of the pure time preference parameter is unbalanced in particular no consideration is given to the role of agent relative ethics which i has a wellestablished philosophical pedigree going back to david hume ii is likely to correspond closely to world wide public attitudes towards intergenerational welfare and iii would entail discounting a unit of welfare accruing to future generations compared to an equal unit accruing to people alive today at a positive rate the authors also discuss the other ethical parameter upon which the discount rate depends namely the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to consumption in the conventional model this simultaneously reflects different aspects of inequality aversion as well as risk aversion which complicates its interpretation finally they discuss the divergence between market rates of discount and the low rate chosen in the review and the limitations on the one hand on the normative significance of market rates as well as the danger on the other hand of relying on rates chosen by elites or philosopher kings

are remittances insurance evidence from rainfall shocks in the philippines several facts motivate this study first life in developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk such as crop and income loss due to natural disasters weather insect infestations and fire and civil conflict second international migration and remittance flows are substantial and growing between 1965 and 2000 individuals living outside their country of birth grew from 2 2 to 2 9 percent of the world population totaling 175 million people in 2000 the remittances that these migrants send to their countries of origin are an important but poorly understood type of international financial flow this article examines a mechanism for coping with shocks ex post on which previous micro level studies have not focused remittances from family members overseas at the international level it is commonly posited that remittance flows from overseas buffer economic shocks in migrants home countries but there have been relatively few empirical tests of this claim with micro level household data related research on the role of domestic migration in pooling risk within extended families includes lucas and stark 1985 rosenzweig and stark 1989 and paulson 2000

genuine saving and positional externalities much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption yet positional externalities have so far been ignored in savings based indicators of sustainable development this

genuine saving and the social cost of taxation following the 1987 report by the world commission on environment and development the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development and the world bank regula

choices and the value of natural capital sustainability requires maintaining opportunities for future generations so they can meet their needs opportunities are passed to future generations through a set of capital assets nature provides an important class of these assets but markets seldom reveal the marginal value of natural capital rather the marginal social worth or asset price must be imputed based on intertemporal exchange in the context of assessing whether intertemporal allocation rules lead to sustainable development appropriate asset prices must be based on the actual allocations and trade offs society makes therefore measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of asset prices is an important empirical task we review the theory of measuring natural capital asset prices and discuss the key elements of measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of natural capital asset prices we place the measurement of economic programmes and natural capital asset prices in the context of wealth based sustainability metrics

modelling loss of resilience in agroecosystems rangelands in botswana economists have recently begun to consider the questions raised by the ecological concept of resilience a measure of the degree to which a system can be perturbed before it switches from one stability domain to another at a theoretical level it has been argued that the loss of resilience in an ecological economic system involves a change in its long run productive potential but no consideration has yet been given to the empirical investigation of this this paper discusses an econometric approach to the problem using the example of semi arid rangelands the long run productive potential of the system is regarded as an unobserved state variable change in which is irreversible or at least only slowly reversible it is estimated by applying the extended nonlinear kalman filter the paper illustrates the approach using data from botswana for the period 1965 1993 the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters associated with the loss of resilience mechanism are non zero they indicate a small loss of resilience event at the end of the long drought in the 1980s however these parameters are very imprecisely estimated and are therefore statistically insignificant we find that the sensitivity of the system to exogenous shocks varies with fluctuations in both economic and non economic parameters contrary to what is usually thought to be the case the sensitivity of the system to exogenous shocks is only weakly affected by variations in offtake prices but is very strongly affected by variations in the cost of herd maintenance this suggests that offtake prices may be a weak tool for controlling the size of cattle stocks and preventing a loss of resilience on the other hand taxes on cattle stocks or grazing fees may be very effective