Capital Theory and the Measurement of Sustainable Development: An Indicator of “Weak” Sustainability

Pearce, David; Atkinson, Giles

doi:10.4324/9781315240084-15

Cited by 127 publications

(171 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, this approach of the compensation principle only focuses on injuries to people. This is the reason why this criterion is considered to adopt a weak sustainability principle that underestimates the need for conserving biodiversity and dismisses the singularities of natural capital (Pearce and Atkinson, 1993;Ekins, 2003).…”

Section: -Is Biodiversity Offsetting Aligned With the Weak Or Strong mentioning

confidence: 99%

Biodiversity offsetting: Clearing up misunderstandings between conservation and economics to take further action

Vaissière

Levrel

Scemama

2017

Biological Conservation

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International audienceBiodiversity offsetting (BO) is increasingly adopted as a conservation tool by many countries while it has received several critics among which its possible links to several forms of Nature economicization. We believe that some of these concerns rest on misunderstandings generated by the difficulty to interpret economic principles from ecological viewpoints and the lack of a common language between conservationists and economists. Because this issue is vivid and the concepts not yet stabilized, key aspects of the potential advances and limits of BO to conservation practice must be clarified. This short communication (1) addresses the links between the BO concept and the central sustainability principle and (2) clarifies key assumptions regarding three potential Nature economicization roles recurrently attributed to BO. We show that the BO principle reflects a move from welfare equivalency mostly inherited from mainstream economic approach based on weak sustainability criteria toward an ecological economic approach based on strong sustainability criteria and the quest for ecological equivalence. However, the way the countries implement BO influences the possibility to reach strong sustainability. Although we show that BO could be linked to a certain acceptance of “commodification”, we suggest that BO can neither be considered as a “marketization” and nor generally as a “privatization” of Nature. We therefore argue that these conceptual misunderstandings should not hamper conservation objectives and that BO must be framed within interdisciplinary approaches combining ecology, economy and socio-political aspects. We conclude that conservation science has a major role to play in defining the boundaries of BO

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Section: -Is Biodiversity Offsetting Aligned With the Weak Or Strong mentioning

confidence: 99%

Biodiversity offsetting: Clearing up misunderstandings between conservation and economics to take further action

Vaissière

Levrel

Scemama

2017

Biological Conservation

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“…The work of Pearce and Atkinson (1993) in developing the idea of GS as an indicator of sustainability moves away from a strict strong sustainability perspective since GS allow for reductions in natural capital to be offset by increases in human or produced capital. The GS concept does not rest formally on WS (Dasgupta, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genuine Savings and Sustainability

Hanley,

Dupuy,

McLaughlin

2015

Journal of Economic Surveys

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Genuine Savings has emerged as the leading economic indicator of sustainable economic development at the country level. It derives from the literatures on weak sustainability, wealth accounting and national income accounting. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of GS, focusing on the relationship between changes in a nation's extended capital stock and the future path of consumption. The indicator has entered widespread use propelled by the World Bank's publications, despite its varying performance as a predictor for future consumption. Notwithstanding the extensive body of literature reviewed, promising future research avenues are identified.

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“…8 A macro level test of SD is to examine whether, year-on-year, an economy's per capita stock of comprehensive wealth is falling, rising, or remaining constant in value terms. 9 The intuition of Pearce and Atkinson (1993) was that countries with positive levels of GS would satisfy a requirement of weak sustainability, since by implication their total capital stocks would not be declining in value. Most empirical tests of the predictive power of GS follow the empirical strategy of Ferreira and Vincent (2005) and Ferreira et al (2008).…”

Section: The Economics Of Sustainable Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long-Run: Lessons from Germany

Blum

McLaughlin

Hanley

2019

German Economic Review

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We construct long‐run sustainability indicators based on changes in Comprehensive Wealth – which we refer to as Genuine Savings (GS) – for Germany over the period 1850–2000. We find that German sustainability indicators are positive for the most part, although they are negative during and after the two World Wars and also the Great Depression. We also test the relationship between these wealth changes and a number of measures of well‐being over the long‐run: changes in consumption as well as changes in average height and infant mortality rates. We find a positive relationship between GS and our well‐being indicators over different time horizons, however, the relationship breaks down during WWII. We also test if the GS/Comprehensive Wealth framework is able to cope with massive disinvestment at the end of the Second World War due to war‐related destructions and dismantlement. We find that negative rates of GS were by and large avoided due to the accumulation of technology and growth‐friendly institutions. We demonstrate the importance of broader measures of capital, including measures of technological progress, and its role in the process of economic development; and the limits of conventional measures of investment to understand why future German consumption did not collapse.

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Capital Theory and the Measurement of Sustainable Development: An Indicator of “Weak” Sustainability

Cited by 127 publications

References 1 publication

Biodiversity offsetting: Clearing up misunderstandings between conservation and economics to take further action

Biodiversity offsetting: Clearing up misunderstandings between conservation and economics to take further action

Genuine Savings and Sustainability

Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long-Run: Lessons from Germany

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