This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general "zero-net-aggregate-investment" condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of...

This work examines the impact that economic growth can have on biodiversity and on the ecological dynamics that would naturally emerge in the absence of human activity. The loss of biodiversity may induce policy-makers to implement defensive actions that prevent single species from extinction....

A tragedy of the commons appears when the users of a common resource have incentives to exploit it more than the socially efficient level. We analyze the situation when the tragedy of the commons is embedded in a network of users and sources. Users play a game of extractions, where they decide...

Recent years have seen an increasing consensus on the Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) principles and structure, and the widespread recognition of its effectiveness in dealing with multiples and interconnected coastal issues. A successful ICZM programme adjusted to a specific context...

This paper examines a simple North-South growth model where negative externalities may contribute to reinforce economic growth. Agents' welfare depends on three goods in the model: leisure, a common access renewable natural resource (one in each hemisphere) and a non-storable consumption good....

There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the noncooperative equilibrium, and...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis (EKC) postulates an inverted u-shaped curve between important pollutants and per capita GDP analogous to the relationship between in-come inequality and income per capita which has been analysed by Kuznets in 1955. The arti-cle focuses on an empirical...

In the domain of desertification and climate change an important amount of new knowledge and research material has been obtained from the many projects carried out in the EU-DG12 Environment and Climate programme. However, so far little effort has gone into making this scientific material...

Climate change is widely recognised as a serious threat to the world's environment. The Mediterranean basin is considered as a unique scaled down model to assess the severity of potential climate change impacts on coastal zones. The paper examines the regional differences in the vulnerability of...

In the current age of trade and financial openness, local economies in developing countries are becoming increasingly exposed to external investments. The objective of the proposed two-sector model with environmental externalities is to provide an insight into the interaction between external...