Sustainable development and formal models: background and summary

Abstract

For about a decade economists have been discussing the concept of sustainable development and trying to incorporate it into economic theories and methods. Although the precise definition of sustainable development is subject to different interpretations, it is generally agreed that it refers to the long-term mutual interdependence between resource availability and environmental quality on the one hand and a stable economic development on the other hand. This volume contains a collection of surveys of the most important issues in formal — both theoretical and applied — analysis of sustainable development. Because of the focus on formal approaches, the title of this volume has been chosen to include ‘models’. This is not to say that only formal modelling approaches are relevant or that they are more important than other type of approaches. We just regard them as an essential part of the wider study of the long-term interaction between complex human and complex natural systems.KeywordsSustainable DevelopmentSustainability IndicatorComputable General Equilibrium ModelEndogenous Growth ModelGenuine SavingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.