Showing papers by "Tim Jackson published in 1994"

Measuring sustainable economic welfare. A pilot index: 1950-1990

Abstract: Concepts of national economic performance such as Gross National Product (GNP) are not necessarily measures or indices of welfare - and in particular of sustainable welfare - in the economy. In the United States, Daly and Cobb have developed an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) which adjusts a personal consumption based measure to account for a variety of social and environmental factors not generally included in measuring economic progress. This paper takes the broad framework developed there and tests its application to another developed country (the United Kingdom) between the years 1950 and 1990 with the aim of assessing the feasibility of using such measures quite broadly as indices of sustainable welfare. Sources of data and methodological factors are discussed, international comparability is investigated, and the lamentations of the exercise are analysed. The preliminary results suggest that in the chosen test country sustainable economic welfare displayed a trend similar to that shown in the US between 1950 and 1990, but followed a substantially different path from GNP, departing in particular from a straightforward measure of economic output during the late 1970s and the 1980s. 71 refs, 16 figs, 5 tabs