Coupling versus Decoupling? Challenging Evidence over the Link between Economic Growth and Resource Use

Kostas Bithas,Panos Kalimeris

doi:10.3390/su14031459

Abstract

With the UN indicating that climate objectives are well off track, the dependency of the economy on resources remains a crucial issue demanding holistic consideration. As a key global sustainability issue, the linkage between resource use and economic growth has long been under heated debate. The increasing amount of resources used for economic growth has elevated environmentalists’ concerns over resource scarcity and environmental impacts, suggesting the existence of coupling between resources and the economy. In contrast, the declining Material Intensity (MI)—resources needed to produce one unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—has led to optimism for many economists and decision makers with far reaching implications for resources and economic policies. Through novel divergence indicators by using long-term datasets, we find that there has been increasing divergence between total and per capita resources use and MI at both the global and the national level. This increasing divergence is due to the faster growth in the total and per capita amount of resources rather than the reduction in the amount of resources per unit of GDP (MI). These divergences indicate underappreciated challenges and opportunities for sustainable economic growth, resource management and implementation of circular economy policies.

Highlights

The link between resources and economy (R–E link) is commonly evaluated by the total and per capita amounts of resources used in economic growth and the so-called MaterialIntensity (MI), namely the amount of resources required per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) [1,2]
The dramatically increasing total and per capita amount of non-renewable natural resources used for economic development indicates a strong coupling, worrying many environmental scientists who are concerned about resource depletion and environmental damage [5,6,7]
The present study proposes novel composite divergence indicators, by using core Material Flow Analysis framework (MFA)

Summary

Introduction

The link between resources and economy (R–E link) is commonly evaluated by the total and per capita amounts of resources used in economic growth and the so-called MaterialIntensity (MI), namely the amount of resources required per unit of GDP [1,2]. The MI is declining in the vast majority of national economies due to several factors such as technological advances, outsourcing of heavy industry, and the restructuring of economies toward the service sector [1,8,9,10,11,12]. This is the so-called decoupling effect that provides empirical evidence for the lack of concern over the scarcity of natural resources, an optimism adopted by several scholars, including some Nobel laureates in economics [13,14]. Such vastly different perspectives, based on different measures, have led to decades of hot debates over the dependency of growth on natural resources and sustainability prospects [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]

Methods

Results

Conclusion