Sustainable Growth: Modelling, Issues and Policies

This document is a literature review of sustainable growth. Because there are many definitions of sustainable growth, we use the following one that is very common in economics. Economic growth is 'sustainable', if it meets the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This concerns both the availability of resources for future generations and the environmental impacts of current decisions on future activities. Section I, we consider issues and policy measures related to the resource problem. We introduce dynamic models in which exhaustible resources are used in production and apply them to several cases: an open economy, a backstop technology and the relationship of climate and economic growth. We also examine a transition of dirty to clean technology and the consequences of this to public finance and intergenerational equity. In Section II, we consider macroeconomic performance with natural resources: origins and effects of resource abundance, patterns of development for world prices, resource depletion, peak production, "Dutch disease" and external debt. If economic growth affects environment, then the abatement of environmental damages must be included into the discussion of sustainable economic growth. In Section III, we present resource extraction and the environmental impacts of economic activities in the context of multiple decision makers. This introduces strategic interactions of agents, e.g. firms, households and nations. We consider collusion as well as Cournot, Bertrand games and discuss on diverse micro and macro policies that consider incentive compatibility. In the Appendix, we introduce a finite horizon procedure called Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMC) by which the models presented in this survey can be numerically solved

Revisiting the bi-directional causality between debt and growth:Evidence from linear and nonlinear tests

We revisit the bi-directional causality between public debt and the rate of GDP growth for 10 EMU countries alongside the US, UK and Japan, over sample periods spanning from 1970 up to 2014 whilst accounting for the nonlinear properties of both the individual time series, and their relation in both directions. Our results indicate that the causal relation between debt and growth, in either direction, is weak at best. For most of the countries in our sample, we find no robust evidence of a long-run causal effect using bi-variate Granger causality tests. Bi-directional causality is detected only for Austria, while for France, Luxembourg and Portugal, causality runs solely from debt to growth, but the estimated effects are very small. In Finland, Spain and Italy, Granger causality (from growth to debt in the former two and debt to growth in Italy) appears to be present in the short-run. Our findings cannot be taken as evidence that a high level of public indebtedness is not risky for the economy or as invalidating hypotheses postulating effects in either direction in the relation between debt and growth

Genetic affinities among Mongol ethnic groups and their relationship to Turks

The central Asian country Mongolia is home to more than 20 tribes and ethnic groups, some of which are related to neighboring Turkic populations. The main Mongolian people, Khalkha, live in central and eastern Mongolia while the Tsaatan minority lives in the north of the country. The Oold minority is from the western Altai mountain region and live in close proximity with Turkic people. We have typed the HLA-A, -B, -Cw, -DRB1 and -DQB1 loci by PCR-SSP in these three Mongolian populations as well as a sample of the German population. To examine their genetic relationships, a sample of the Turkish population already typed at the HLA-A, -B and -DRB1 loci were used. Altogether five populations were analyzed: Khalkha (n =100), Tsaatan (n = 72), Oold (n = 52), German (n = 260) and (Anatolian) Turkish (n=498). Nei's unbiased genetic identity (GI) and genetic distance (GD) were estimated from genotypes using PopGene v1.31, and dendrograms were constructed using PHYLIP. The results suggested a close relationship of the Khalkha to the Tsaatan. The Turks and Germans were equally distant to all three Mongolian populations. These results confirmed the lack of strong genetic relationship between the Mongols and the Turks despite the close relationship of their languages (Altaic group) and shared historical neighborhood. This study has provided useful population data for genetic and anthropologic studies bridging eastern and western populations