intergenerational equity and sustainability abstract this paper explores the limitations of conventional economic analysis of intergenerational problems and examines some of the alternatives suggested in the literature it is argued that proper consideration of future generations has at least three requirements first when future costs and benefits are considered it should be taken into account that they are to be enjoyed by different generations second the sustainability requirement should be adopted this represents an equity commitment to the future and implies the recognition that future generations have the right to nondeteriorated ecological and economic capacity the paper studies the ways in which the recognition of these rights might be incorporated into economic evaluation and management third an appropriate institutional network to enforce the recognition of these rights in decision making processes should be constituted its design and necessary functions are also analyzed

natural capital and the theory of economic growth abstract during the past half century theorizing about economic growth has forced economists to reconsider and revise the capital concept a number of times this paper explores the analytical relationship between capital accumulation and economic growth on the one hand and the natural world on the other section 1 sketches modern growth theory with an emphasis on whether or not the economy is seen as facing biophysical limits to growth section 2 argues that analysis of the role that natural capital plays in the production process must occur before one can assess the prospects for economic growth section 3 inserts natural capital into a simple growth model and discusses the implications that 1 depletion of natural capital 2 complementarity in production of natural and social forms of capital and 3 accumulation of technical knowledge have for the growth process

profit sharing and productivity microeconomic evidence from the united states profit sharing has often been suggested as a potential solution to principal agent problems in the workplace the relationship between productivity and profit sharing is examined using a panel dataset drawn from 2 976 publicly held companies over the 1971 85 period alternatively using firm intercept and first difference specifications the regression results indicate that the adoption of profit sharing is associated with a 2 5 4 2 percent increase in productivity in addition the size of the effect increases with the proportion of employees participating in profit sharing these results hold under a variety of specifications and do not appear to be explained by accompanying changes in management or personnel policies copyright 1992 by royal economic society

technological learning environments and organizational practices cross sectoral evidence from britain this study explores the co occurrence of technological and organizational learning processes by analyzing the adoption and use of four types of human resource management hrm practices rewarding problem solving top down management and decentralization in the 1990s across different technological learning environments using a sample of british workplaces we show that the level of use of diverse hrm practices aimed at creating different learning incentives is persistently heterogeneous across technological learning environments suggesting that hrm forms an essential part of the technological learning structure of firms copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

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

profit sharing and productivity an analysis of uk engineering firms this paper reports productivity differentials of 3 8 percent in favor of profit sharing firms in the u k engineering industry the estimates come from equations in which profit sharing interacts with factor input levels and the firms technological organizational and labor force characteristics and imply more than a simple incentive effect on work effort or more cooperative behavior in given circumstances a technological labor relations interpretation of the origin of the gains is suggested which are found to be asymmetrically distributed the results question policy measures to encourage profit sharing that do not take account of its significance in the process of organizational design copyright 1989 by royal economic society

environment and development is there a kuznets curve for co2 emissions this article re examines the relationship between growth in per capita income and environmental degradation using econometric techniques appropriate for smooth transition regressions with panel data this is a more intuitive and flexible methodology than the polynomial models widely used in the literature and it can reconcile some of the mixed results found previously the methodology is applied to carbon dioxide emissions from nonoecd countries over the period 1971 to 1997 although there is no evidence of environmental kuznets curve we find two regimes namely a low income regime where emissions accelerate with economic growth and a middle to high income regime associated with a deceleration in environmental degradation

a physical view of sustainability abstract we assume that natural ecological communities tend to maximize the amount of stored biomass on a given area thereby creating the highest sustainable rate of entropy formation possible from that area we take this climax condition to define sustainability human intervention through agriculture reduced the ecosystem in given areas to a juvenile state a state which seems to produce entropy at a lower rate than that of the natural climax condition the gap in entropy production rates between the natural and the agricultural system would eventually be overcome by the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels these fossil fuels are consumed much faster than they are being formed and therefore a social structure based on their extensive use cannot be sustainable what type of social structure does meet our definition of sustainability that is what style and size of social activity will generate entropy at a rate no greater than that of the climax ecosystem in a particular area during the last two decades studies of economic activities and their environmental repercussions were limited to the possible costs and benefits of pollution control and to the economically optimal extraction rates of mineral resources the intrusion of human activities into the environment became increasingly apparent through the depletion of natural resource stocks and decreasing environmental quality in the 1990s sustainability of the socio economic system within the global ecosystem has become the pressing issue although research is increasingly concerned with the question of sustainability a definition based on physically measurable evidence is missing such a definition is proposed in this paper and an example application is given for a particular area

national product related welfare measures in the presence of technological change externalities and uncertainty the purpose of this paper is to discuss under what conditions welfare can be measured by observables related to the national product or hamiltonian along the optimal trajectory under nonattributable technological or environmental change welfare will depend on time itself meaning that the hamiltonian along the optimal trajectory will be a biased measure of welfare this result will also hold if we make the time dependence of welfare endogenous by replacing technological change will externalities that are not internalized during optimization on the other hand if we take the externalities fully into account then the hamiltonian will represent the appropriate measure of welfare similar results also hold in the case of uncertainty where we show that a generalized hamiltonian provides a welfare measure and that the deterministic measures are special cases of their stochastic counterparts

linking economic and ecological models for a marine ecosystem increasingly economists and ecologists have begun to recognize the value to public policy of combining information and results from each discipline into multidisciplinary studies here we present a methodological approach that links economic and ecological analyses we develop an economic ecological model by merging an input output model of a coastal economy with a model of a marine food web we describe distinct linear system sub models of the economy and the ecosystem and we develop a method for linking the two our method extends the work of earlier researchers by incorporating an ecosystem matrix into resource multipliers and by showing how these multipliers may be calculated we present a numerical example for the new england region using coastal economic and marine ecological data from the region for a restricted set of industry sectors and food web trophic levels we calculate resource multipliers for the example and we simulate the economic impacts of changes in primary production in the ecosystem on final demands for fishery products the results illustrate the effects of incorporating the impacts of habitat destruction and ecosystem structure on resource multipliers our approach can be extended to incorporate the full range of sectors in the economy and trophic levels in a linked ecosystem 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

economics and sustainability balancing trade offs and imperatives the concept of sustainability has been increasingly invoked in scholarly and public policy debates discussion has been hampered however by uncertainty and lack of uniformity in the meaning of sustainability this paper seeks to identify some common ground among economists ecologists and environmen tal ethicists two issues seem salient require ments for intergenerational and the defi nition of social capital to be provided to future generations a concept of safe minimum standard which has received at least some recognition in the ecology philosophy and eco nomics literatures may provide the beginnings of a common ground for debate about sus tainability jel q2

cooperation productivity and profit sharing firm specific assets generate an ex post bargaining problem over surplus division and rational workers may collude to obtain a surplus share in nonpecuniary form through restriction of effort conversely profit sharing should motivate cooperation to increase productivity when work organization facilitates interaction and horizontal monitoring since productive effort yields positive externalities to workers under contractual surplus sharing in simultaneous tobit estimates we find a strong influence of profit sharing on factor productivity in a sample of medium sized metalworking capitalist firms in west germany proxies for human capital and organizational factors were included

the income environment relationship evidence from a binary response model abstract the empirical environmental kuznets curve ekc literature is vast but far from conclusive many authors have analysed the existence of an ekc for various pollutants others have used the ekc framework to identify country characteristics that help to explain the income environment relationship in this framework environmental degradation is analysed using a second or third order polynomial in income and a limited number of control variables some authors question whether this standard framework is appropriate this paper proposes an alternative to study the specific characteristics of countries that have experienced economic growth and an improving environment at the same time we estimate a binary response model and find an ekc like relation between the probability that a country s environment improves with economic growth and per capita gdp our evidence further suggests that the level of environmental damage is an important explanatory variable we also confirm the importance of an open political system these results indicate that the binary response model could be a valuable alternative to test which country specific characteristics are associated with a negative ier

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

quantification of interdependencies between economic systems and ecosystem services an input output model applied to the seine estuary abstract the aim of this paper is to assess the possible contribution of an input output model towards two of the basic principles of the sustainability strategy of integrated coastal zone management iczm and post normal science according to these principles decision support tools should offer a holistic perspective and handle high uncertainty the difficulties in reaching sustainability are due partly to the prevailing use of narrow system boundary tools that are non holistic consequently they fail to capture important ecosystem services and ignore interdependencies between them to comply with the basic principles our method allows environmental assets to be evaluated in multiple units and integrates results from recent researches in natural sciences both enable coverage of interdependencies between ecosystem services thereby we enlarge input output modelling from the two conventional ecosystem services of sink and provisioning to the most vital ones the supporting services an application to the seine estuary addresses the impacts of maritime transportation infrastructures on nursery habitats for commercial fish the ecosystem services covered are life support and resource provisioning our results show that the restoration of a total of 73 7 km 2 of nursery areas over the period 2004 2015 would result in a stock of sole in 2015 that exceeds the business as usual scenario by 44 2 uncertainty range 35 9 69 9 in spite of high restoration costs the negative macro economic impact is very low however on the sector level a trade off results between nurseries and three economic sectors the quantification of such trade offs in our model is particularly useful to public participation in decision making

effects of a carbon price in the u s on economic sectors resource use and emissions an input output approach abstract despite differences in their implementation most carbon policies aim to have similar outcomes effectively raising the price of carbon intensive products relative to non carbon intensive products while it is possible to predict the simple broad scale economic impacts of raising the price of carbon intensive products the demand for non carbon intensive products will increase understanding the economic and environmental impacts of carbon policies throughout the life cycle of both types of products is more difficult using the example of a carbon tax this study proposes a methodology that integrates short term policy induced consumer demand changes into the input output framework to analyze the environmental and economic repercussions of a policy environmental repercussions include the direct and the indirect impacts on emissions materials flow in the economy and the reliance on various ecosystem goods and services the approach combines economic data with data about physical flow of fossil fuels between sectors consumption of natural resources and emissions from each sector it applies several input output modeling equations sequentially and uses various levels of aggregation disaggregation it is illustrated with the data for the 2002 u s economy and physical flows the framework provides insight into the short term complex interactions between carbon price and its economic and environmental effects

a note on the calculus for physical input output analysis and its application to land appropriation of international trade activities abstract in a recent paper in this journal embodied land appropriation in international trade activities was analysed using a physical input output table piot ecological economics 44 2003 137 the authors stated that there are significant differences between the physical and the monetary input output tables in their results which the authors argued to be due to the fact that the results from the monetary table are determined mainly by the monetary structure of final demand while the structure of a physical table more closely resembles the physical realities of an economy in the present paper it is argued that the methodological foundation that the authors based their analysis on is misleading and does not satisfy the overall material balance requirement it is shown that the differences in the results between the monetary and physical tables presented by the authors have nothing to do with the resemblance to the physical realities i also tried to further clarify a number of critical issues in applying physical input output tables related to double counting treatment of wastes and the effect of closing the system toward direct material inputs a number of consistent but different approaches to cope with these issues are presented including their proofs the embodied land appropriation of international trade activities is calculated and compared by applying those approaches there are many advantages of using physical input output tables however their superiority should not be exaggerated nor be regarded as absolute depending on how it is constructed and used it is also possible that the results from a physical input output table do not tell us more than that indeed some commodities are cheaper or more costly per unit of their mass

green accounting and economic policy abstract through the lens of conventional national accounting resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth the old system of national accounts sna has been revised and a set of environmental satellite accounts proposed certain weaknesses however pervade the new proposals the conventional measurements remain largely unaltered and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex as proposed they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks while the economically more important flow accounts to their detriment are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values the sna the paper stresses is primarily an economic framework incapable of capturing all environmental change and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries whose overriding environmental concern is pollution this can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement analysis and policy the paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income sometimes called weak sustainability which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological or stronger sustainability

new methodology for the ecological footprint with an application to the new zealand economy abstract sustainable development has become a primary objective for many countries throughout the world since the late 1980s a major difficulty associated with sustainable development objectives however is the absence of reliable indicators to measure progress towards the goal of sustainability the ecological footprint provides an estimate of the land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption for a given population on an aggregate basis the ecological footprint may be compared with the amount of ecologically productive land available to give an indication of whether consumption patterns are likely to be sustainable this paper proposes the use of a modified form of input output analysis to calculate the ecological footprint the input output approach provides a consistent means of calculating an ecological footprint using data collected as part of the system of national accounts in most developed countries in addition it makes explicit the link between the level of economic activity in a country and its corresponding impact on the environment an application of this methodology to new zealand indicates that it takes 3 49 has of ecologically productive land per year to sustain the average new zealander s current level of consumption

concepts of efficiency in ecological economics sisyphus and the decision maker abstract efficiency forms the bedrock of policy planning and business approaches to sustainable development but what do ecological economists mean by efficiency in the resource use context efficiency has a wide range of potential interpretations from the ratio of work output energy inputs to pareto efficiency despite the potential richness of the efficiency concept in practice efficiency is often narrowly conceived within disciplinary boundaries this appears to be the case even in ecological economics which purports to be transdisciplinary and pluralistic such narrow disciplinary perspectives essentially waste the richness of the efficiency concept this wasting could mean ecological economists and decision makers are destined to sisyphean toil in the pursuit of sustainable development this paper explores the efficiency concept and its interpretation it then reviews ecological economic literature to find that there is much room for improvement in the way ecological economists apply efficiency finally the paper presents a framework within which a truly ecological economic approach to efficiency can emerge armed with this framework policy makers and planners should be better prepared to make decisions leading to sustainable development

the impact of economic development and social political factors on ecological footprint a panel data analysis for 15 mena countries abstract this paper extends the work of al mulali and ozturk 2015 1 by re investigating the environment kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for 15 mena middle east and north african countries using the ecological footprint ef as a proxy of environmental degradation over the period 1975 2007 unlike the existing studies we augment the basic ekc relationship by considering life expectancy at birth fertility rate and political institutional index variables as new possible determinants of environmental degradation the estimation of this relationship has been conducted for all mena 15 countries for oil exporting and non oil exporting countries sub samples the results show that energy use worsens ecological footprint whereas real gdp per capita exhibits an inverted u shaped relationship with ef in oil exporting countries and in the sample as a whole i e the ekc hypothesis is validated for the non oil exporting countries the relationship between ef and economic growth is u shaped moreover our findings show that socio demographic variables such as urbanization life expectancy at birth and fertility rate improve the environment in the long term we also found that the improvement of political institutions in those countries has not been accompanied by a reduction of environmental stress the granger causality results support evidence of the existence of an error correction mechanism between the ef real gdp energy use and the fertility rate specifically in the short term we found strong evidence for bidirectional causality among the ecological real gdp and energy use variables

toward consilience between biology and economics the contribution of ecological economics abstract during its ten year history ecological economics has made a real difference in the way economists look at the natural world and in the way biologists look at the economy in this survey article we examine the contributions to the journal in terms of e o wilson s concept of consilience that is his argument that the methods and assumptions of any field of study should be consistent with the known and accepted facts in other disciplines in particular we examine the contributions of ecological economics to reconciling the economic theory of the consumer and producer with biophysical reality

allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis we present and discuss a method that allows the disaggregation of national ecological footprints by economic sector detailed final demand category sub national area or socio economic group this is done by combining existing national footprint accounts with input output analysis calculations in the empirical part are carried out by using supply and use tables for the united kingdom covering the reporting period 2000 ecological footprints are allocated to detailed household consumption activities following the coicop classification system and to a detailed breakdown of capital investment the method presented enables the calculation of comparable ecological footprints on all sub national levels and for different socio economic groups the novelty of the approach lies in the use of input output analysis to re allocate existing footprint accounts in the detail of disaggregation by consumption category and in the expanded use of household expenditure data this extends the potential for applications of the ecological footprint concept and helps to inform scenarios policies and strategies on sustainable consumption the method described in this paper can be applied to every country for which a national footprint account exists and where appropriate economic and environmental accounts are available the approach helps to save time in data collection and improves the consistency between ecological footprint estimates for a particular human society from different researchers for these reasons the suggested methodology includes crucial steps on the way towards a standardisation of ecological footprint accounts

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

profit related pay prose discovered this paper estimates that in 1984 43 percent of british private sector establishments had some form of profit related pay regression results do not show that these establishments had statistically significant better financial performance cross ta bulations do not suggest that the establishments with income sharing schemes had noticeably greater employment growth or better industrial relations copyright 1988 by royal economic society

characterizing nonlinearities in business cycles using smooth transition autoregressive models during the past few years investigators have found evidence indicating that various time series representing business cycles such as production and unemployment may be nonlinear in this paper it is assumed that if the time series is nonlinear then it can be adequately described by a smooth transition autoregressive star model the paper describes the application of these models to quarterly logarithmic production indices for 13 countries and europe tests reject linearity for most of these series and estimated star models indicate that the nonlinearity is needed mainly to describe the responses of production to large negative shocks such as oil price shocks

smooth transition pollution income paths abstract we explore the idea of regime switching as a new methodological approach in the analysis of the emission income relationship the basic idea is that when some threshold is passed the economy could move smoothly to another regime with the emission income relationship being different between the old and the new regime the methodology is applied to a panel dataset of us state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions sulfur dioxide emissions are found to smoothly peak at a relatively late stage of economic development and then smoothly decrease at high levels of income however for the nitrogen oxide emissions environmental pressure tends to rise with economic growth then slows down but does not decline with further growth

profit related pay and the u k small firm labour market this paper critically examines the relevance of profit related pay prp for the u k small firm sector since 1986 the u k government has actively encouraged prp which attracts generous tax breaks because it believed that prp would make pay more flexible downwards and would significantly improve employee identification morale and productivity an analysis of the theoretical arguments and the assumptions made regarding the nature of the u k small firm sector that underlay these claims suggests however that the likelihood of achieving either of these alleged benefits is small an appraisal of the available empirical evidence on the practical implementation and operation of prp schemes suggests that the tax relief simply encourages firms to introduce cosmetic schemes that have no appreciable impact upon the behaviour of either firms or employees moreover the experience of some firms that adopted prp schemes indicates that far from increasing morale and productivity prp often creates new tensions and conflict between owners and employees these and other unintended consequences illustrate the inherent difficulties of government attempts to use the tax system to alter the behaviour of agents engaged in a wide variety of complex and very heterogeneous bargaining situations

trust law sustainability and responsible action abstract the problem of managing for sustainability is marked by the need to make decisions on behalf of others and by the uncertainties that attend such decisions however the economic literature on sustainability has paid scant attention to how decisions on behalf of others might differ from decisions on behalf of oneself and when risk has been modeled explicitly the expected utility hypothesis has generally been used a generation acts sustainably if the expected value of the next generation s utility is not less than the present s this paper investigates how we think about responsibly acting on another s behalf by looking to the united states law of trusts because in important respects the current generation views its responsibility to the future as a trust relationship trust law illuminates responsible decision making under both risk and uncertainty even under conditions of risk more conservative action than would be suggested by the expected utility hypothesis is warranted because it emphasizes preservation of trust principal and disavows profit maximization trust doctrine indicates that special caution should be exercised in conditions of uncertainty finally resource economic concepts of strong sustainability the precautionary principle and the safe minimum standard of conservation are interpreted according to trust principles

ecosystem service appropriation in the auckland region economy an input output analysis patterson m g mcdonald g w and smith n j ecosystem service appropriation in the auckland region economy an input output analysis regional studies this paper assesses the appropriation of ecosystem services by the auckland region economy in new zealand a novel application of environmental input output analysis is used to trace biophysical interdependence within the regional economy the methodology provides a step by step procedure for tracing the appropriation of various ecosystem services using infinite regress chains displayed as appropriation chain diagrams critical dependencies on ecosystem services are revealed throughout the economy through case studies of two selected industries namely air transport and business services patterson m g mcdonald g w et smith n j l affectation des services de l ecosysteme dans l economie regionale d auckland une analyse repartition redistribution regional studies cet article cherche a evaluer l affectation des services de l ecosysteme par l ec

the simple macroeconomics of profit sharing this paper is in the spirit of the temporary equilibrium approach to macroeconomics it basically extends that framework to cover a profit sharing system and then compares the macroeconomic characteristics with those of the more familiar wage system a first preliminary step is to demonstrate how a microeconomic model of monopolistic competition can be built up into a junior member of the keynesian macro family the methodology is to create from first principles including a careful formulation of a monopolistically competitive product market structurea natural underpinning for the standard aggregate demand specification the primary goal of the paper is to apply the integrated monopolistic competitionkeynesian type apparatus described above to investigate the macroeconomic properties of a profit sharing economy the existence of a consistent general framework covering both cases invites meaningful comparisons that indicate clearly why an economy based on profit sharing principles possesses natural immunity to stagflation by contrast the wage economya system we have largely accepted without critically examining its macroeconomic consequences is more prone to suffer from unemployment and inflation the policy implications for aggregate demand management in wage and share systems are analyzed and contrasted in writing this paper my philosophy has been to not shirk from using those reasonable parameterizations and functional forms which yield nice crisp results and permit me to focus sharply on the essential logic of basic issues it is certainly possible to present the main results in a somewhat more general formulation as the astute reader will appreciate but i fear only at some cost of distracting attention from those central features i wish to highlight

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation abstract the current value hamiltonian in an aggregate optimal growth problem with heterogeneous capital stocks including exhaustible renewable and environmental stocks is the nnp function routine substitutions reveal that the using up of natural resource stocks is representable as easy to interpret economic depreciation magnitudes we obtain true nnp inclusive of natural resource stock diminution implications for actual national accounting practices are also discussed

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

the evolution of preferences why sovereign preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it abstract the conventional economic paradigm assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenous to the economic system and that the economic problem consists of optimally satisfying those preferences tastes and preferences usually do not change rapidly and in the short term this assumption makes sense sustainability is an inherently long term problem and in the long run it does not make sense to assume tastes and preferences are fixed and given if preferences are expected to change over time and under the influence of education advertising changing cultural assumptions etc the old assumption of consumer sovereignty is not adequate different criteria of optimality are needed how preferences change how they relate to the goal of sustainability and how they can or should be actively influenced to satisfy the new criteria needs to be determined ecological economics has emphasized the three rank ordered goals of ecological sustainability fair distribution and allocative efficiency this paper examines how preferences evolve and change over time and the implications of this for developing policies that meet these three goals in democratic societies

profit sharing and the financial performance of companies evidence from u k panel data this paper examines the dynamic relationship between profit sharing and profitability in a sample of u k firms during the 1980s the estimates indicate a positive short run effect of the introduction of profit sharing schemes on the financial performance of companies this relationship is evident even if unobserved firm specific fixed effects and potential endogeneity of profit sharing are controlled for quite apart from its widely recognized influence on productivity and industrial relations profit sharing is arguably a financially attractive option for firms there is also evidence of the persistence of profitability in u k profit sharing firms copyright 1994 by royal economic society

ecosystem prices activity analysis applied to ecosystems abstract in this paper a method is developed to derive prices for natural goods from information about material and energy flows within ecosystems the derivation is based on an analogy between ecological and economic systems both systems are characterized by flows of material and energy to derive ecosystem prices the mathematical structure of koopman s economic linear production model his activity analysis is applied to a material flow model of ecosystems the ecological interpretation of these prices is discussed and the uniqueness of the price system is investigated an algorithm for price calculation is derived and demonstrated with a numerical example finally it is discussed whether ecosystem prices may be suitable as surrogates for economic valuations of natural goods

integrating the valuation of ecosystem services into the input output economics of an alpine region traditional economic accounting mostly ignores the benefits provided by nature and thus falls short in giving incentives for improving the way the economy uses natural resources in this study we develop a general framework for integrating the value of ecosystem services into an input output table in particular we integrate regionally valued ecosystem services on the supply side of an input output table to quantify what natural resources offer to economic development using several different indicators we show the benefits of the ecosystem services under the status quo and a scenario for regional development our results suggest that economic activities should be encouraged to use the ecosystem services more intensively while landscape development should aim at providing the required services we conclude that such an approach can provide a platform for decision makers to learn quantitatively about the dependency of the regional economy on natural services

ecological pricing and economic efficiency abstract there is a need to accurately account for the contributions of environmental assets to the overall economy such accounting would permit policies that allow protection of important natural resources and aid the analytic process to determine an accurate basis for a sustainable economy the aim is to develop an accounting framework for ecology that is sufficiently consistent with the economic framework that the two can be fruitfully combined with appropriate definitions of the flows the two systems can be connected into a common framework no single measure of the system productivity and efficiency can be given for the combined system however until the ecosystem metabolism can be converted into economic terms this could be done with a series of economic valuation techniques ecological prices could then be estimated and a single measure of ecological economic output could be given with the net combined system input and output now in common terms a technical system efficiency measure can logically be proposed because human activity inevitably involves dissipation such emissions would now have a monetary price because such emissions are irrecoverable the total output of the combined system is greater than it is under the current definition giving rise to a technical system wide efficiency measure

the environmental kuznets curve does one size fit all abstract this paper uses a new panel data set on state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from 1929 1994 to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used in the environmental kuznets curve literature empirical results provide initial evidence that an inverted u shape characterizes the relationship between per capita emissions and per capita incomes at the state level parameter estimates suggest however that previous studies which restrict cross sections to undergo identical experiences over time may be presenting statistically biased results

an overlapping generations model of growth and the environment this article analyzes the potential conflict between economic growth and the maintenance of environmental quality in an overlapping generations model short lived individuals make decisions which have long lasting effects on both factor productivity and the environment the model provides a theoretical explanation of observed correlations between environmental quality and income whereby economic growth is associated first with declines then improvements in environmental quality it suggests circumstances in which multiple pareto ranked steady state equilibria may arise and in which sustained growth of both capital and environmental quality may occur overmaintenance of the environment analogous to dynamically inefficient overaccumulation of capital may emerge copyright 1994 by royal economic society

the paretian liberal paradox and ecological economics abstract two of the most basic considerations in collective choice are the pareto principle and some minimal protection of individual rights in his impossibility theorem sen 1970 shows that there is a potential inconsistency between preference sovereignty as expressed by the pareto condition and the protection of minimal rights a liberal or liberty condition the paretian liberal paradox plp and the extensive debate surrounding it prompts serious reconsideration of the traditional welfare economics approach the critique of welfarism made by the plp is of central importance for environmental issues given pervasive externalities missing markets uncertainty and potential irreversibilities making collective choice decisions on these issues may require using explicit non utility information and restricting individual preference sovereignty we explore the implications of the plp for long term environmental policy and the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics as a simple pedagogical device relying on sparse principles the plp stimulates an increased awareness of the potential conflict between preferences and rights recognition of the plp focuses attention on what counts as admissible information in collective choice rules for example consideration of the plp illuminates differences in the informational requirements of alternative sustainability concepts

ecological economic modeling and valuation of ecosystems abstract we are attempting to integrate ecological and economic modeling and analysis in order to improve our understanding of regional systems assess potential future impacts of various land use development and agricultural policy options and to better assess the value of ecological systems starting with an existing spatially articulated ecosystem model of the patuxent river drainage basin in maryland we are adding modules to endogenize the agricultural components of the system especially the impacts of agricultural practices and crop choice and the process of land use decision making the integrated model will allow us to evaluate the indirect effects over long time horizons of current policy options these effects are almost always ignored in partial analyses although they may be very significant and may reverse many long held assumptions and policy predictions this paper is a progress report on this modeling effort indicating our motivations ideas and plans for completion