A comment on the independence of allocation, distribution and scale

There has been considerable debate about the independence of the three policy goals of allocative efficiency, distributional equity, and ecological sustainability since Daly's (1992) paper on the subject (Prakash and Gupta, 1994; Daly, 1994; Stewen, 1998; Daly, 1999; Stewen, 1999). I would like to weigh in here, if I may, because I think it is a key policy issue requiring further discussion. Furthermore, having attended a number of ecological economics' conferences in recent years, it is clear that the issue is highly contentious and often misunderstood. I hope to shed a little more light on the subject by focusing most of my attention on the 1999 reply by Daly (1999) to Stewen's (1998) paper and Stewen’s response to Daly's reply (Stewen, 1999).