Sector-Level Decisions in a Sustainability-Constrained Economy.

Despite two decades of debate, there remains little consensus about what sustainability is, and how it should be achieved. Economists primarily portray sustainability as a macro-level concern, but there has been less attention on the implications of this social objective for policies related to the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Land Economics Vol. 79; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15
Main Authors: Woodward, Richard T., Bishop, Richard C.
Format: Article
Published: University of Wisconsin Press February 2003
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:Despite two decades of debate, there remains little consensus about what sustainability is, and how it should be achieved. Economists primarily portray sustainability as a macro-level concern, but there has been less attention on the implications of this social objective for policies related to the management of individual resources. This paper derives guidance for sector-level planning and project analysis from a macro-level norm of intergenerational fairness. Optimal sustainable management involves making tradeoffs between sectors. We derive a criteria for sector-level planning and project analysis that help make those tradeoffs without losing site of the sustainability goal. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.