Sustainability is compatible with decreasing social welfare

Tanguy Isaac ()
Additional contact information
Tanguy Isaac: Université catholique de Louvain

Economics Bulletin, 2013, vol. 33, issue 2, 1116-1125

Abstract: This note studies the determination of optimal path - i.e. maximizing the intertemporal social welfare - under a sustainability constraint defined as a non-decreasing intertemporal social welfare accross time. We show that this definition suffers from an important drawback : the path obtained is not Pareto optimal. It is a drawback because nothing in our intuition of sustainable allocation justifies to give up a Pareto improvement. This implies also the possibility of false-negative result in the empirical studies aiming to determine if a country is on a sustainable path.

Keywords: sustainability; optimal path; Brundtland criterion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2013/Volume33/EB-13-V33-I2-P105.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-12-00803

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().