Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors under-pinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. This article is a summary of a report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 26 August 4 September 2002. We use the concept of resilience—the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop—as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations. Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are structured scenarios and active adaptive management. These tools require and facilitate a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.

https://bioone.org/journals/AMBIO-A-Journal-of-the-Human-Environment/volume-31/issue-5/0044-7447-31.5.437/Resilience-and-Sustainable-Development--Building-Adaptive-Capacity-in-a/10.1579/0044-7447-31.5.437.pdf

Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations

https://mimoza.marmara.edu.tr/~mtekce/Dinda_2004.pdf

Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis: A Survey

(2002). Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 97, No. 457, pp. 360-360.

Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance

Will the world be able to sustain economic growth indefinitely without running into resource constraints or despoiling the environment beyond repair? What is the relationship between steadily increasing incomes and environmental quality? This paper builds on the author's earlier work (1993), in which he argued that the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality – whether inverse or direct -- is not fixed along a country's development path. Indeed, he hypothesized, it may change as a country reaches a level of income at which people can demand and afford a more efficient infrastructure and a cleaner environment. This implied inverted-U relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth came to be known as the "Environmental Kuznets Curve," by analogy with the income-inequality relationship postulated by Kuznets (1965, 1966). The objective of this paper is to critically review, synthesize and interpret the literature on the relationship between economic growth and environment. This literature has followed two distinct but related strands of research: an empirical strand of ad hoc specifications and estimations of a reduced form equation, relating an environmental impact indicator to income per capita; and a theoretical strand of macroeconomic models of interaction between environmental degradation and economic growth, including optimal growth, endogenous growth and overlapping generations models. The author concludes that the macroeconomic models generally support the empirical findings of the Environmental Kuznets Curve literature. He suggests further empirical investigation related to the assumption of additive separability, as well as development of additional macroeconomic models that allow for a more realistic role for government.

Economic Growth and the Environment

For the last ten years environmentalists and the trade policy community have engaged in a heated debate over the environmental consequences of liberalized trade. The debate was originally fueled by negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations, both of which occurred at a time when concerns over global warming, species extinction and industrial pollution were rising. Recently it has been intensified by the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and proposals for future rounds of trade negotiations. The debate has often been unproductive. It has been hampered by the lack of a common language and also suffered from little recourse to economic theory and empirical evidence. The purpose of this essay is set out what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. We critically review both theory and empirical work to answer three basic questions. What do we know about the relationship between international trade, economic growth and the environment? How can this evidence help us evaluate ongoing policy debates? Where do we go from here?

Trade, Growth and the Environment

CurrentchangesinLatinAmerica includetheabandonment oftheeconomic pattern ofimportsubstitution, a growing opening ofthe nationaleconomies,a continental wave ofpoliticaldemocratization,an apparent economic recoveryfrom the "lost decade" (the1980s),a growing socialpolarization, a worsening ofenvironmental problems,the growing influenceofthe market,and the most intenseurbanization processon the planet.The aim ofthispaper isnot todiscussthe advantages or disadvantagesof the prevailingeconomic pattern,but only to analyze some of thepossibleenvironmental implicationsderived from the way of insertionofthe countriesofthe regioninthe globaleconomy .The regionasa whole isrelatively wellendowed interms ofnaturalresources.With littlemore than 8% ofthe globalpopulation,Latin America has 23% ofthe potentiallyarableland,10% ofthe !-' cultivatedland,17% ofthe pastures,22% ofthe forests(and 52% ofthe tropical `:forests), and 31% ofthe permanently usablefreshwater.Ithas not lessthan 3% of the world reservesoffossilfueland 19% of the technicallyusable hydroelectric rPower.

/pdf/the-environmental-impact-of-globalization-on-latin-america-a-3dq2emq2xd.pdf

The environmental impact of globalization on Latin America: a prospective approach

This paper reviews a range of issues relating to tradeable carbon dioxide quotas. It considers the economic principles on which they are based, compares them with alternative carbon abatement policies, and reviews many aspects of how tradeable quotas would be implemented in practice ... Cette etude passe en revue un certain nombre de problemes en relation avec un systeme de contingents negociables de dioxyde de carbone. Sont pris en consideration, les principes economiques sur lesquels un tel systeme peut se fonder, la comparaison avec d'autres instruments de reduction des emissions de carbone et les aspects de mise en oeuvre pratique des contingents negociables ...

Markets for Tradeable CO2 Emission Quotas Principles and Practice

Political economy views economic issues through the lens of political organisation. In today's world, it must focus on the roles of markets and of democracy, two concepts which are driving revolutionary changes in the political organisation of both Europe and Asia. There are two main paradigms for the analysis of markets and democracy, both of which have been mathematically advanced over a number of years: the general equilibrium theory of markets, and social choice theory, which examines practical aspects of democracy.' While it is true that political economy has made some limited use of the latter in order to examine political-economic issues of democracy, it has made little use of the former, the theory of market behaviour.

/pdf/on-the-mathematical-foundations-of-political-economy-37y1yrc67m.pdf

On the mathematical foundations of political economy

The mystery of brilliant productivity will always be the posing of new questions, the anticipation of new theorems that make accessible valuable results and connections. Without the creation of new viewpoints. without the statement of new aims, mathematics would soon exhaust itself in the rigor of logical proofs and begin to stagnate as its substance vanishes.

Fischer Black: The Mathematics of Uncertainty

Our concern in this paper is to analyze the optimal long-run policies of oil-exporting countries. These might be described briefly as the policies which best meet their objectives, subject to the various limitations imposed on them by the realities of world economic forces.The objectives of the oil-exporting countries have been conveniently summarized in earlier discussions in OPEC Seminars (see Sepahban, 1982) under the following headings:1. The conservation of hydrocarbon resources2. Accelerated economic and social development of their domestic economies, and in particular rapid capital formation.3. Improved terms of trade with industrial countries.4. Maintenance of reasonable rates of economic growth for the international community, including industrial countries.It was shown in the above-mentioned paper that the requirements of the first of these four objectives, namely the conservation of OPEC's hydrocarbon resources, can be met by the application of Hotelling's principle of the economics of exhaustible resources, whereas the requirement of the other three objectives can be met by the use of a compact general equilibrium trade model developed at UNITAR (Chichilnisky, 1981). It was therefore recommended that attempts should be made to find the proper way to combine the main features of these two approaches into a single tool of analysis for the development of a logical strategy for the pricing and production of exhaustible resources, which would meet the requirements of all the above four objectives simultaneously.The present paper achieves this goal by deriving the industrial countries' demand for OPEC oil as a function of price, using the general equilibrium trade model (section two), and applying this demand function to the dynamic Hotelling model (section three); thus introducing the notion of gradually increasing the scarcity of oil into the analysis. We use the derived demand function to compute the marginal revenues as a function of price, and then apply Hotelling's principle, which requires that the marginal revenue increases at a rate equal to the real rate of interest, as a condition for the maximization of the discounted sum of OPEC's revenue.The results show that the optimal path may exhibit upward jumps in OPEC prices, especially in periods which are preceded by a period of slowly increasing or decreasing prices. It therefore bears some resemblance to the actual path of oil prices, which has seen oil price jumps following periods of relatively constant prices.These new findings, together with the prospect of finding non-conflicting solutions, a feature of UNITAR's general equilibrium model, point to a useful direction of future research.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1370669_code1007978.pdf?abstractid=1370669&mirid=1&type=2

Graciela Chichilnisky

Papers

The environmental impact of globalization on Latin America: a prospective approach

Markets for Tradeable CO2 Emission Quotas Principles and Practice

On the mathematical foundations of political economy

Fischer Black: The Mathematics of Uncertainty

Non-Conflicting Resource Pricing Policies in an Interdependent World