The Economics of Sustainability

A collection of refereed journal essays on the economics of sustainability. Sustainability in this collection is taken to involve some concern for intergenerational equity or fairness in the long-term decision-making of a whole society; some recognition of the role of this on finite environmental resources; and some recognisable, if perhaps unconventional, use of economic concepts such as instantaneous utility, cost, or intertemporal welfare. The editors chose to focus mainly on primary papers, rather than surveys, and the papers are organized primarily by date. The first three papers are the classics by Dasgupta and Heal (1974), The Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources , Stiglitz (1974), Growth With Exhaustible Natural Resources: Efficient and Optimal Growth Paths , and Solow (1974), Intergenerational Equity and Exhaustible Resources .