Sustainable Exploitation of a Natural Resource: A Satisfying Use of Chichilnisky’s Criterion

Charles Figuieres and Mabel Tidball
Additional contact information
Mabel Tidball: INRA, UMR LAMETA

A chapter in The Economics of the Global Environment, 2016, pp 207-229 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Chichilnisky’s criterion for sustainability has the merit to be, so far, the unique explicit, complete and continuous social welfare criterion that combines successfully the requirement of efficiency with an instrumental notion of intergenerational equity (no dictatorship of the present and no dictatorhsip of the future). But it has one drawback: when applied in the context of renewable resources, and with a constant discount factor, there exists no exploitation path that maximizes this criterion. The present article suggests a way to cope with this problem. The idea is to restrict attention to the set of convex combinations between the optimal discounted utilitarian program and the stationary program leading to the green golden rule. It is shown that an optimal path in this set exists under rather weak sufficient conditions on the fundamentals of the problem. Some ethical properties of this approach are also discussed. In some cases, it turns out that the restricted solution implies no loss of efficiency and benefits intermediate and infinitely distant generations.

Keywords: Sustainability; Intergenerational equity; Chichilnisky’s criterion; Natural resources (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O40 Q01 Q2 Q3 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Sustainable exploitation of a natural resource: a satisfying use of Chichilnisky’s criterion (2012)
Working Paper: Sustainable exploitation of a natural resource: a satisfying use of Chichilnisky's criterion (2006)
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:spr:steccp:978-3-319-31943-8_11

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319319438

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31943-8_11

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Economic Theory from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().