When historians in the far distant future look back upon the tumultuous twentieth century, they will likely judge the most outstanding feature to be the extraordinary increase in human numbers that has occurred during this relatively short time period. It took the entire history of humanity –...

The IPAT-model developed by Ehrlich and Holdren is widespread in ecological economics in order to quantify the impact of population growth on environmental deterioration. We comment on this model and extensions proposed by several authors from a theoretical and empirical point of view.

The paper develops an integrated baseline model to assess the trade-offs be- tween the natural environment and economic growth. Consumption growth is considered under welfare and sustainability aspects. The framework features capital accumulation and the sectoral structure of the economy as key...