Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that the economy is convex, nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens. We show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained. We also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth, computed in terms of the accounting prices, can be used as an index for problems (2) and (3) above. The remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources, transacted in a few well known economic institutions.Sustainable development, Imperfect economies

Environmental and Resource Economics: Some Recent Developments by

A first draft of this paper was prepared when the authors were visiting the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, during April-May 2004. The current version was completed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in June 2004, while the authors were attending the bi-annual teaching and research workshop of the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE). We are most grateful to K. Sreenivasan (Director of ICTP), and Manik Duggar and Priya Shyamsundar (respectively, Programme Manager and Director of SANDEE), for making our visits both possible and most agreeable. Over the years, we have benefited greatly from discussions with Scott Barrett, William Brock, Stev

Social dimensions of fertility behavior and consumption patterns in the Anthropocene.

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes