As GDP is a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, this report has been commissioned to more accurately understand the social progress indicators of any given state. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used measure of economic activity. There are international standards for its calculation, and much thought has gone into its statistical and conceptual bases. But GDP mainly measures market production, though it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions. One reason why money measures of economic performance and living standards have come to play such an important role in our societies is that the monetary valuation of goods and services makes it easy to add up quantities of a very different nature. When we know the prices of apple juice and DVD players, we can add up their values and make statements about production and consumption in a single figure. But market prices are more than an accounting device. Economic theory tells us that when markets are functioning properly, the ratio of one market price to another is reflective of the relative appreciation of the two products by those who purchase them. Moreover, GDP captures all final goods in the economy, whether they are consumed by households, firms or government. Valuing them with their prices would thus seem to be a good way of capturing, in a single number, how well-off society is at a particular moment. Furthermore, keeping prices unchanged while observing how quantities of goods and services that enter GDP move over time would seem like a reasonable way of making a statement about how society’s living standards are evolving in real terms. As it turns out, things are more complicated. First, prices may not exist for some goods and services (if for instance government provides free health insurance or if households are engaged in child care), raising the question of how these services should be valued. Second, even where there are market prices, they may deviate from society’s underlying valuation. In particular, when the consumption or production of particular products affects society as a whole, the price that individuals pay for those products will differ from their value to society at large. Environmental damage caused by production or consumption activities that is not reflected in market prices is a well-known example.

https://andrewoswald.com/docs/stiglitz20report_commission20final20200920sept.pdf

Report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress

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

Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis: A Survey

This chapter discusses leading problems linked to energy that the world is now confronting and to propose some ideas concerning possible solutions. Oil deserves special attention among all energy sources. Since the beginning of 1981, it has merely been continuing and enhancing the downward movement in consumption and prices caused by excessive rises, especially for light crudes such as those from Africa, and the slowing down of worldwide economic growth. Densely-populated oil-producing countries need to produce to live, to pay for their food and their equipment. If the economic growth of the industrialized countries were to be 4%, even if investment in the rational use of energy were pushed to the limit and the development of nonpetroleum energy sources were also pursued actively, it would be extremely difficult to prevent a sharp rise in prices. It is evident that it is absolutely necessary to pursue actively the development of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power if a physical shortage of energy is not to block economic growth.

World energy outlook

An overview of sustainability assessment methodologies

Modern management theory is constricted by a fractured epistemology. which separates humanity from nature and truth from morality. Reintegration is necessary if organizational science is to support ecologically and socially sustainable development. This article posits requisites of such development and rejects the paradigms of conventional technocentrism and antithetical ecocentrism on grounds of incongruence. A more fruitful integrative paradigm of “sustaincentrism” is then articulated, and implications for organizational science are generated as if sustainability, extended community, and our Academy mattered.

http://ingenieroambiental.com/inf/elparagigmadeldesarrollosustentable.PDF

Shifting Paradigms for Sustainable Development: Implications for Management Theory and Research

Economic analysis of sustainable growth and sustainable development

The decade of the 1980s has witnessed a fundamental change in the way governments and development agencies think about environment and development. The two are no longer regarded as mutually exclusive. It is now recognized that a healthy environment is essential to sustainable development and a healthy economy. This paper attempts to analyze the concepts of sustainable development, sustainable resource use and sustainable growth in terms of conventional economic analysis, to examine why free market forces may not achieve sustainability, and to explain how policy interventions may help or hinder the achievement of sustainability.

Sustainable Development Concepts: An Economic Analysis

A definition of sustainability as maintaining ‘utility’ (average human wellbeing) over the very long term future is used to build ideas from physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, history, philosophy, economics and psychology, into a coherent, interdisciplinary analysis of the potential for sustaining industrial civilisation. This potential is highly uncertain, because it is hard to know how long the ‘technology treadmill’, of substituting accumulated tools and knowledge for declining natural resource inputs to production, can continue. Policies to make the treadmill work more efficiently, by controlling its pervasive environmental, social and psychological external costs, and policies to control population, will help to realise this potential. Unprecedented levels of global co-operation, among very unequal nations, will be essential for many of these policies to work effectively. Even then, tougher action may be required, motivated by an explicit moral concern for sustainability. An evolutionary analysis of history suggests that technology and morality can and will respond to a clearly perceived future threat to civilisation; but we cannot easily predict the threat, or whether our response will be fast enough.

Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide

Rethinking the role of occupant behavior in building energy performance: A review

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

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3147239

John C.V. Pezzey

Papers

Economic analysis of sustainable growth and sustainable development

Sustainable Development Concepts: An Economic Analysis

Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide

Rethinking the role of occupant behavior in building energy performance: A review

Sustainability Constraints versus "Optimality" versus Intertemporal Concern, and Axioms versus Data