An Environmental-Economic Measure of Sustainable Development

A central issue in the study of sustainable development is the interplay of growth and sacrifice in a dynamic economy. This paper investigates the relationship among current consumption, growth, and sustained consumption in two canonical, stylized economies and in a more general context. It is found that the maximin value measures what is sustainable and provides the limit to growth. Maximin value is interpreted as an environmental-economic carrying capacity and current consumption or utility as an environmental-economic footprint. The time derivative of maximin value is interpreted as net investment in sustainability improvement. It is called durable savings to distinguish it from genuine savings, usually computed with discounted utilitarian prices.sustained development, growth, maximin, sustainability indicator

Les ressources non renouvelables : le côté offre

Il y a un malaise intellectuel qui afflige le côté « demande » en économie des ressources non renouvelables, c’est-à-dire la branche qui vise à relier l’épuisement des stocks globaux à la consommation agrégée. On passe ici en revue les « faits stylisés » de la discipline, lesquels apparaissent plus cohérents avec les contraintes imposées par le côté « offre ». On note que l’hétérogénéité des réserves est plus pertinente aux faits que leur épuisabilité; que l’existence de biais d’agrégation rend futile la prédiction des prix; que l’investissement joue un rôle important; et que la politique économique devrait être plus attentive aux asymétries d’information.An intellectual malaise afflicts that branch of the economics of natural resources which attempts to relate the exhaustion of global stocks to aggregate consumption, namely the demand side. Here, the stylized facts of the discipline are reviewed and shown to be more consistent with constraints originating on the supply side. The heterogeneity of reserves seems more relevant than exhaustibility; aggregation biases make the forecasting of prices futile; investment plays an important role; and policy should pay greater attention to asymmetries of informations

La recherche de rentes en situation d’incertitude avec ou sans opposition

Les caractéristiques d’équilibre d’un modèle stochastique de la recherche de rentes sont rapportées et discutées. La proposition que les coûts sociaux de la recherche de rentes par des individus riscophobes sont inférieurs au total des rentes est d’abord confirmée. Le modèle de recherche de rentes avec rentes endogènes est ensuite élargi pour y inclure une opposition, créée par ceux que le processus désavantage. Diverses prédictions trouvées dans cette littérature sont qualifiées, incluant (1) la relation entre le total des efforts, le total des rentes et le total des pertes sociales, (2) l’impact d’une augmentation du total des rentes possibles sur l’effort de l’opposition, et (3) l’apparence de « désintérêt de la déréglementation ». Un aspect important de cette analyse est l’ambiguïté de plusieurs effets. Cette ambiguïté fournit une explication possible au fait que la théorie de la recherche de rentes n’a, jusqu’à date, fourni aucune prédiction définitive au sujet des caractéristiques de l’équilibre.In this paper a stochastic model of rent-seeking equilibrium is examined. It is confirmed that social costs of rent seeking by risk-averse individuals are lower than the total of rents. Also, rent seeking harms other groups in society, and opposition by these groups is explicitly introduced into the analysis. Light is shed on some of the important questions of the theory of rent seeking, including (1) the relationship of total expenditures, total rents and total deadweight losses, (2) the response of opposition efforts to increases in total possible rents and (3) an apparent "disinterest in deregulation." One of the salient features of the analysis, however, is the ambiguity of several effects. This ambiguity may help to explain why the intuitively appealing notion of rent seeking has not provided definitive predictions of the characteristics of equilibrium

Les ressources non renouvelables : le côté offre

An intellectual malaise afflicts that branch of the economics of natural resources which attempts to relate the exhaustion of global stocks to aggregate consumption, namely the demand side. Here, the stylized facts of the discipline are reviewed and shown to be more consistent with constraints originating on the supply side. The heterogeneity of reserves seems more relevant than exhaustibility; aggregation biases make the forecasting of prices futile; investment plays an important role; and policy should pay greater attention to asymmetries of informations. Il y a un malaise intellectuel qui afflige le côté « demande » en économie des ressources non renouvelables, c’est-à-dire la branche qui vise à relier l’épuisement des stocks globaux à la consommation agrégée. On passe ici en revue les « faits stylisés » de la discipline, lesquels apparaissent plus cohérents avec les contraintes imposées par le côté « offre ». On note que l’hétérogénéité des réserves est plus pertinente aux faits que leur épuisabilité; que l’existence de biais d’agrégation rend futile la prédiction des prix; que l’investissement joue un rôle important; et que la politique économique devrait être plus attentive aux asymétries d’information.

La recherche de rentes en situation d’incertitude avec ou sans opposition

In this paper a stochastic model of rent-seeking equilibrium is examined. It is confirmed that social costs of rent seeking by risk-averse individuals are lower than the total of rents. Also, rent seeking harms other groups in society, and opposition by these groups is explicitly introduced into the analysis. Light is shed on some of the important questions of the theory of rent seeking, including (1) the relationship of total expenditures, total rents and total deadweight losses, (2) the response of opposition efforts to increases in total possible rents and (3) an apparent "disinterest in deregulation." One of the salient features of the analysis, however, is the ambiguity of several effects. This ambiguity may help to explain why the intuitively appealing notion of rent seeking has not provided definitive predictions of the characteristics of equilibrium. Les caractéristiques d’équilibre d’un modèle stochastique de la recherche de rentes sont rapportées et discutées. La proposition que les coûts sociaux de la recherche de rentes par des individus riscophobes sont inférieurs au total des rentes est d’abord confirmée. Le modèle de recherche de rentes avec rentes endogènes est ensuite élargi pour y inclure une opposition, créée par ceux que le processus désavantage. Diverses prédictions trouvées dans cette littérature sont qualifiées, incluant (1) la relation entre le total des efforts, le total des rentes et le total des pertes sociales, (2) l’impact d’une augmentation du total des rentes possibles sur l’effort de l’opposition, et (3) l’apparence de « désintérêt de la déréglementation ». Un aspect important de cette analyse est l’ambiguïté de plusieurs effets. Cette ambiguïté fournit une explication possible au fait que la théorie de la recherche de rentes n’a, jusqu’à date, fourni aucune prédiction définitive au sujet des caractéristiques de l’équilibre.

Constitutional Change and the Private Sector: The Case of the Resource Amendment

The 1982 resource amendment to the Constitution, section 92A, has been analysed primarily from the perspective of its impact on intergovernmental relations in the formation of resource policies Yet the fundamental, constitutional \u27rules of the game\u27 may also affect the ongoing relationship between governments and private-sector resource participants In this article, the authors discuss how section 92A might affect that relationship in terms both of the policy-making process and of the substance of the resultant policie

The Resource Amendment (Section 92A) and the Political Economy of Canadian Federalism

The 1982 resource amendment to the Constitution, section 92A, purports to alter the balance of federal-provincial legislative powers in relation to natural resources. Section 92A was enacted into the Constitution largely as a result of the federal-provincial resource conflicts of the 1970\u27s and early 1980\u27s; conflicts in which the chief antagonists were the federal government and the governments of the Western provinces. In this article, the authors discuss the development of section 92A from its roots in the conflicts of the 1970\u27s, and explore section 92A\u27s possible legal, political and economic effects on the inter-governmental framework for managing Canadian resources and on the resolution of any future federal-provincial conflicts over resources

The Resource Amendment (Section 92A) and the Political Economy of Canadian Federalism

The 1982 resource amendment to the Constitution, section 92A, purports to alter the balance of federal-provincial legislative powers in relation to natural resources. Section 92A was enacted into the Constitution largely as a result of the federal-provincial resource conflicts of the 1970\u27s and early 1980\u27s; conflicts in which the chief antagonists were the federal government and the governments of the Western provinces. In this article, the authors discuss the development of section 92A from its roots in the conflicts of the 1970\u27s, and explore section 92A\u27s possible legal, political and economic effects on the inter-governmental framework for managing Canadian resources and on the resolution of any future federal-provincial conflicts over resources

Green Accounting for a Commercial Fishery

The theory of extensions to the national accounts is expressed in models in which wealth is being explicitly maximized. For the fishery, the central issue is such valuation when the policy being followed is inefficient. We begin the task of making such valuations for commercial products of a fishery. Capacity is limited by investment in fishing boats. Therefore, depreciation of the boats has to be evaluated as well as depletion of the fish stock. Depletion of a non-optimal fishery can be evaluated, and is always greater than depletion of an optimal fishery. Statistical requirements are found and examples are given on how to apply them.KEY WORDS green accounting, fishery, non-optimality, ca­pacity, depletio

Tautness for riemannian foliations on non-compact manifolds

For a riemannian foliation $\mathcal{F}$ on a closed manifold $M$, it is known that $\mathcal{F}$ is taut (i.e. the leaves are minimal submanifolds) if and only if the (tautness) class defined by the mean curvature form $\kappa_\mu$ (relatively to a suitable riemannian metric $\mu$) is zero. In the transversally orientable case, tautness is equivalent to the non-vanishing of the top basic cohomology group $H^{^{n}}(M/\mathcal{F})$, where n = \codim \mathcal{F}. By the Poincar\'e Duality, this last condition is equivalent to the non-vanishing of the basic twisted cohomology group $H^{^{0}}_{_{\kappa_\mu}}(M/\mathcal{F})$, when $M$ is oriented. When $M$ is not compact, the tautness class is not even defined in general. In this work, we recover the previous study and results for a particular case of riemannian foliations on non compact manifolds: the regular part of a singular riemannian foliation on a compact manifold (CERF).Comment: 18 page