This paper investigates the economic implications of a comprehensive approach to sustainable greenhouse policies that strives to stabilise the atmospheric concentration of the five major greenhouse gases at an ecologically determined threshold level. In a theoretical optimisation model...

Sustainable development is a relatively well-known concept. Although there are many definitions, the underlying concepts and aims are generally agreed upon. Many local communities have established a 'vision' of sustainability in terms of policies, goals, actions, etc in order to translate...

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that...

In this paper, we elaborate on an idea initially developed by Weitzman (1998) that justifies taking the lowest possible discount rate for far-distant future cash flows. His argument relies on the arbitrary assumption that when the future rate of return of capital (RRC) is uncertain, one should...

Equal treatment for the present and the future was required in two axioms for sustainable development introduced by the author. This article shows that the two axioms are equivalent to awareness of physical limits in the long run future. We prove that two optimization problems are equivalent :...

In this paper, we elaborate on an idea initially developed by Weitzman (1998) that justifies taking the lowest possible discount rate for far-distant future cash flows. His argument relies on the arbitrary assumption that when the future rate of return of capital (RRC) is uncertain, one should...

Equal treatment for the present and the future was required in two axioms introduced in the articles by Chichilnisky of the years 1996 and 1997. These articles provide a characterization of the decision criterion that satisfies the axioms and shows that the two axioms are equivalent to physical...

This paper sketches a re-conceptualisation of sustainable development (SD) on the basis of the capability approach (CA). The notion sustainable development was developed as a compromise in a political process and has been re-interpreted (some say: diluted) again and again in the last 20 years....

Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which it is justified and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of...