Land Economics articles from November 1997

Land Economics archives from November 1997

Sustainability constraints versus "optimality" versus intertemporal concern, and axioms versus data.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION A temptation when writing on "defining sustainability" is to try to distill, from the myriad debates, a single definition which commands the widest possible academic consent. However, several years spent in fitful pursuit of...

What is sustainable development?(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. A VORACIOUS USE OF RESOURCES For the first time in history, human activity has reached levels at which it could alter the planet's climate and its biological mix. Economics is the driving force. Energy used for production is obtained by...

How to decide when experts disagree: uncertainty-based choice rules in environmental policy.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION William Nordhaus (1994a) recently conducted a survey of experts on the implications of global warming. The surveyed experts were chosen by their peers as individuals with an in-depth understanding of the likely economic effects...

Paying down the environmental debt. (Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION The costs of cleaning up the environment involve multiyear programs for many sites and/or problems and sums in the billions of dollars. We have Superfund activities in the United States in mind. But obviously the site cleanup...

Hicksian income from resource extraction in an open economy.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION Hicks (1946) defined income as "the maximum value which [a man] can consume during a week, and still expect to be as well off at the end of the week as he was in the beginning." One possible interpretation of the term "as well...

Neoclassical natural capital theory and "weak" indicators for sustainability.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION The classical economists, in the 18th and 19th centuries, tended to regard the primary environmental supports for economic production activity as either non-scarce (such as air) or nondepletable (such as arable land). From this...

Sustainability: ecological and economic perspectives.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... !!! BEGIN AUTH ABST Admonitions to decision makers to "act sustainably" founder on conceptual ambiguities that transcend disciplinary boundaries and affect the definition and assessment of sustainability. In this article we address these...

Sustainability as opportunity.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION The concept of sustainable development is criticized by skeptics as poorly defined and perhaps inoperational (Beckerman 1994). Some participants in discussions of natural resource and environmental management take the term to...

On the problem of achieving efficiency and equity, intergenerationally.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... The earth belongs in usufruct to the living. - Thomas Jefferson I. INTRODUCTION In a recent Science article Arrow and ten other economists strongly recommend the use of benefit-cost analysis, with discounting, for making decisions...

Dimensions of sustainability: geographical, temporal, institutional, and psychological.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. BACKGROUND Sustainability, for purposes of this paper, refers to the supply side of intergenerational linkages, that is, to the capability of a society to maintain or increase the level of some measure of aggregate utility. The Brundtland...

Policies for sustainability: lessons from an overlapping generations model.(Special Issue: Defining Sustainability)
November 1, 1997... I. INTRODUCTION The debate over sustainability has taken a variety of forms, and several different disciplines have participated. Economists often frame the basic issue in the following way. Do markets generate incentives for resource...