The role of natural resources in production: Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz

Quentin Couix

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: This paper proposes a historical and epistemological account of one of the key controversy between natural resources economics and ecological economics, lasting from early 1970s to the end of 1990s. It shows that the theoretical disagreement on the scope of the economy's dependence to natural resources, such as energy and minerals, has deep methodological roots. On one hand, Solow's and Stiglitz's works are built on a “model-based methodology”, where the model precedes and supports the conceptual foundations of the theory and in particular the assumption of “unbounded resources productivity”. On the other hand, Georgescu-Roegen's counter-assumption of “thermodynamic limits to production”, later revived by Daly, rest on a methodology of “interdisciplinary consistency” which considers thermodynamics as a relevant scientific referent for economic theory. While antagonistic, these two methodologies face similar issues regarding the conceptual foundations that arise from them, which is a source of confusion and of the difficult dialogue between paradigms

Keywords: natural resources; thermodynamics; growth; sustainability; model; theory; methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B22 B41 Q01 Q32 Q43 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2018/18001.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The role of natural resources in production: Georgescu-Roegen/ Daly versus Solow/ Stiglitz (2018)
Working Paper: The role of natural resources in production: Georgescu-Roegen/ Daly versus Solow/ Stiglitz (2018)
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:mse:cesdoc:18001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().