The meaning of sustainability is the subject of intense debate among environmental and resourceeconomists. Perhaps no other issue separates more the traditional economic view of the naturalworld from the views of most natural scientists. The debate currently focuses on the...

The values of goods and services provided by natural and constructed wetlands are examined through a meta-analysis of 418 observations of the economic value of 186 wetlands. Water quality improvement, non-consumptive recreation, and provision of natural habitat and biodiversity turn out to be...

What is a 'sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations’? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of...

This article presents a model of sequential decisions about investments in environmentally dirty and clean technologies, which extends the path-dependence framework of Arthur (1989). This allows us to evaluate if and how an economy locked into a dirty technology can be unlocked and move towards...

We address the notion of dynamic, endogenous diversity and its role in theories of investment and technological innovation. We develop a formal model of an innovation arising from the combination of two existing modules with the objective to optimize the net benefits of diversity. The model...

In this paper we present an overview of methods and components of formal economic models employing evolutionary approaches. This compromises two levels: (1) techniques of evolutionary modelling, including multi-agent modelling, evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary game theory; (2) building...

We explore the idea of public policy from the perspective of evolutionary thinking. This involves paying attention to concepts like diversity, population, selection, innovation, coevolution, group selection, path-dependence and lock-in. We critically discuss the notion of evolutionary progress....

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...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and 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...

A spatial welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It incorporates agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities and various land use categories. The model is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations...