This chapter focuses on how the lack of property rights in North-South trade of primary resources can distort trade and threaten the sustainablility of development. This issue is examined within a two-region world economy where one region, the North, represents the industrial countries, and the...

This paper examines the role of the international market in mediating North-South relations and analyzes how the market works in distributing the gains from trade. It is argued that the international market does not always provide an adequate engine of growth for the South if that region...

The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these...

The present acceleration of environmental destruction can be linked to the economic trading strategies that came into vogue after World War II. The theory of comparative advantages of trade, which recommends that developing countries emphasize resource exports and exports of labor-intensive...

We consider here optimal use patterns for renewable resources and address the problem of optimal use of renewable resources under a variety of assumptions both about the nature of the economy in which these resources are embedded and about the objective of that economy. Although we focus here on...

Economics often provides the wrong incentives to those who control the assets, such as people in developing countries where most forests are located and who could potentially benefit most from conservation . There is increasing unease about this situation, and an emerging view is that standard...

This paper discusses to what extent the recent trends in energy consumption and production are compatible with the requirements of sustainable development. For this purpose, starting from a simple identity applied to the energy sector, we use the decomposition analysis to derive a few analytical...