Sustainable Development: Renewable Resources and Technological Progress

Simone Valente

CEIS Research Paper from Tor Vergata University, CEIS

Abstract: Conflicts between optimality and sustainability are typical in the literature on sustainable development. Using the 'capital-resource' growth model, Pezzey and Withagen (1998) have proved that if natural resources are exhaustible, the time-path of consumption is single-peaked, declining from some point in time onwards. This paper extends the model to include technical progress, resource renewability, extraction costs and population growth. The main result is that, for any constant returns to scale technology, optimal paths can be sustainable only if the social discount rate does not exceed the sum of the rates of resource regeneration and augmentation. The development of resource-saving techniques is crucial for sustaining consumption per capita in the long run, whereas capital depreciation and extraction costs are neutral with respect to this sustainability condition.

Keywords: Optimal Growth; Renewable Resources; Sustainable Development; Technological Progress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q20 O11 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ino
Date: 2004-04-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (3) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://www.ceistorvergata.it/repec/rpaper/No-54-Valente.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sustainable Development, Renewable Resources and Technological Progress (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:54

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
CEIS - Centre for Economic and International Studies - Faculty of Economics - University of Rome "Tor Vergata" - Via Columbia, 2 00133 Roma
http://www.ceistorvergata.it

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEIS Research Paper from Tor Vergata University, CEIS
Address: CEIS - Centre for Economic and International Studies - Faculty of Economics - University of Rome "Tor Vergata" - Via Columbia, 2 00133 Roma
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Barbara Piazzi ().