Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment

Ecological Applications

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 13-15

  Arrow, Kenneth ^a   Bolin, Bert ^b   Costanza, Robert ^c   Dasgupta, Partha ^d   Folke, Carl ^e   Holling, C S ^f   Jansson, Bengt Owe ^b   Levin, Simon ^g   Mäler, Karl Göran ^e   Perrings, Charles ^h   Pimentel, David ⁱ  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

^c UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

^e ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES   (Sweden)

^f University of Florida   (United States)

^g PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^h UNIVERSITY OF YORK   (United Kingdom)

ⁱ Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0008301109     PISSN: 10510761     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2269539     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. This is a report of the Second Askö Meeting, held 31 August to 2 September 1994, in the archipelago outside Stockholm, Sweden. The meeting was organized by the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Box 50005, S10405 Stockholm, Sweden. The aim of the meeting was to establish a substantive dialogue among a small group of ecologists and economists to gauge whether an interdisciplinary consensus exists on the issues of economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment and to determine what could be said about the joint development of economic and environmental policy.
2. x, and CO (3) [G. M. Grossman and A. B. Krueger, in The U.S. Mexico Free Trade Agreement, P. Garber, Ed. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1993), pp. 165-177].
3. N. Shafik and S. Bandyopadhay, "Economic growth and environmental quality: time senes and cross country evidence" (background paper for the World Development Report, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1992).
4. W. Beckerman, World Dev. 20, 481 (1992).
5. A. M. Jansson, M. Hammer, C. Folke, R. Costanza, Eds. Investing in Natural Capital: the Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability (Island Press, Washington, DC, 1994).
6. 2 emissions, but adequate institutions are required and it is by no means an automatic consequence of growth.
7. R. Lopez, J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 27, 163 (1994); T. M. Selden and D. Song; ibid., p. 147; K. Anderson and R. Blackhurst, Eds. The Greening of World Trade Issues (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, UK, 1992).
8. R. Lopez, J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 27, 163 (1994); T. M. Selden and D. Song; ibid., p. 147; K. Anderson and R. Blackhurst, Eds. The Greening of World Trade Issues (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, UK, 1992).
9. R. Lopez, J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 27, 163 (1994); T. M. Selden and D. Song; ibid., p. 147; K. Anderson and R. Blackhurst, Eds. The Greening of World Trade Issues (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, UK, 1992).
10. A related issue is the measurement of economic growth at the macro level. The conventional measure, GNP, is far from adequate as a measure of true economic performance. We need a more comprehensive index that includes the flow of environmental services as well as the value of net changes in the stocks of natural capital so that the true social costs of growth can be internalized. With this improved index, many of the apparent conflicts between "growth" and the environment would disappear because environmental degradation would be subtracted from the index. [See, for example, P. Dasgupta and K.-G. Mäler, The Environment and Emerging Development Issues, Proceedings of the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, 1990 (Supplement to the World Bank Economic Review, 1991).
11. P. M. Vitousek, P. R. Ehrlich, A. H. Ehrlich, P. A. Matson, BioScience 36, 368 (1986).
12. Another way is to focus on ecosystem dynamics in the neighborhood of an equilibrium. The object here is to measure the resistance of a system to disturbances and to determine the speed with which it returns to equilibrium. [See S. L. Pimm, Nature 307, 321 (1984).]
13. C. S. Holling, Annu. Rev. Ecol. System, 4, 123 (1973).
14. Adaptive management views regional development policy and management as "experiments," where interventions at several scales are made to achieve understanding, to produce a social or economic product, and to identify options. [See, for example, C. S. Holling, Ed., Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (Wiley, London, 1978);
15. C. J. Walters, Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources (Macmillan, New York, 1986);
16. K. Lee, Compass and the Gyroscope (Island Press, Washington, DC, 1993).
17. We thank the two anonymous referees for helpful comments.