The welfare economic concept of fairness offers an attractive, axiomatic foundation for the popular notion of stewardship. Fairness emphasizes the ex ante equal standing of all persons, across and within generations. This highlights the inextracability of poverty alleviation and environmental...

Does the present concern about sustainability raise fundamentally new issues for economics, or is it dealing with problems already on our agenda? There are two points that are central to sustainability: a concern for what happens in the long-run, and a respect for the constraints that the...

This paper investigates how one can derive "fair" allocation shares for renewable and non-renewable resources from a Rawlsian standpoint. Since there are competing interests over limited resources both within and between generations, it is argued that the respective trade-offs call for a more...

This paper analyzes overlapping-generations models where natural capital is owned by selfish agents. Transfers in favor of young agents reduce the rate of depletion and increase output growth. It is shown that intergenerational transfers may be preferred to laissez-faire by an indefinite...

Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...