Traditional economic theory describes economic agents as being perfectly rational. According to this approach, agents posses all necessary information and have the ability to process this information to make the best decision for maximizing their profit. However, in the real world this...

In this paper we present a sector-based approach to investigate whether green growth – combining economic growth with environmental sustainability – is feasible. Our approach considers the relation between on the one hand carbon dioxide emissions per dollar of output (what we will call...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial-economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is found to...

Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy...

Proposed alternatives to GDP as a measure of social welfare or human progress are briefly evaluated. Four main categories are considered, namely ISEW and GPI based on corrections of GDP, sustainable or green(ed) GDP, genuine savings/investments and composite indexes. All these alternatives turn...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial-economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is found to...

Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy...

The debate on growth versus the environment is usually summarized as optimists believing in limitless growth versus pessimists seeing environmental and resource limits to growth. This opposition defines the main strategies: namely, striving for green growth versus some anti-growth approach. In...

Climate policy has been mainly studied with economic models that assume representative, rational agents. However, it aims at changing behavior associated with carbon-intensive goods that are often subject to bounded rationality and social preferences, such as status and imitation. Here we use a...

This short paper considers all possible stakeholders in different stages of a sustainability transition and matches their behavioral features and diversity to policies. This will involve an assessment of potential or expected responses of stakeholders to a range of policy instruments. Following...