Die Gemeinwohl-Ökonomie

The Common Good Balance Sheet, an Adequate Tool to Capture Non-Financials?

“…Following the triple bottom line approach [10], Felber [11,12] proposes an alternative model: the ECG model, of which the purpose is to achieve full respect for human rights-related fundamental values within companies worldwide and, thus, a more employee-centered viewpoint of firms based on cooperation and the prosecution of general interest; hence, shedding light on the need to balance economic, social and environmental outcomes. The ECG model has as main goals the business contribution to the common good and cooperation instead of profit spirit and competition.…”

Ecological Econophysics for Degrowth

“…A different hypothesis is that cooperatives are too difficult to generalize because they imply quite specific patterns of relations, perhaps reducing the available states of the system more than really needed. The later case would lead us to favor proposals such as Felber's [179], who would enforce the cooperative structure legally, but only for firms above some given size (while promoting cooperativism also among smaller firms and setting constraints on the differences of salary in all cases). Another important research topic, needing an econophysical approach, is the global consequences for sustainability and equity if social economic structures become hegemonic.…”

“…These include cooperatives of production, consumption and credit, mutual aid associations, ethical banking (with credits conditional upon environmental and social criteria), and small experiences of alternative markets such as local exchange trading systems (LETS) [177], which are based on collective interest-free credit. There is a potential for synergy among these types of experiences, which have been seen as pieces for a completely different system by several writers, already in the 19th century (e.g., Proudhon [178]) and also nowadays [176,179]. For example, credits granted by a public or collectively owned banking system could be interest-free, while avoiding an imbalance between offer and demand by setting social and environmental benefits as a "price".…”

“…However, any specific recipe focusing on the part of working time that is formalized and quantified should also consider its indirect effects on less visible forms of work. For example, the German Greens in their 1983 social platform ( [193], reviewed in [8]) prioritized the reduction of the working week over formulas such as earlier retirement or longer vacations (we can add sabbatical years, which are proposed in [179]), because only the first eases the sharing of unpaid work between genders.…”

“…Felber [179] has recently popularized a specific proposal to put together different social economic initiatives in a coherent system, under the label of economy for the "common good" (this label had also been applied to Daly's steady-state economy [184]). This proposal aims to gradually transform conventional firms into social firms (or gradually replace the first with the last).…”