This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of economic performance through time. The model incorporates four main determinants of economic performance: technology, capital investment, the division of labor and quality of institutions. It demonstrates that growth is not automatic even...

En este trabajo presentamos un modelo de crecimiento económico y contaminación, que incorpora un sector de investigación en tecnologías menos contaminantes. Además, a diferencia de otros modelos propuestos en este contexto, incluye la posibilidad de destinar parte del capital existente a la...

The concept of sustainable development requires countries all over the world to use their natural resources rationally while pursuing their economic development, and at the same time to consider the quality of environment as a determinant of their societies’ welfare. First, the method of...

In modern societies individuals often try to alleviate their personal damages from environmental degradation by increasing their consumption of private goods. Although this “self-protective” behavior is very frequent in industrial economies, insufficient attention has been paid to its...

The aim of the paper is to justify why contemporary economics must be reoriented from the direction of Economic Growth to the direction of Sustainable Development. Human society is at a deadly curve. The Economic crisis is only one slice of Gordon’s Knot of Crises of our Civilization. The...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) represents a much debated research hypothesis. The article reviews the literature, starting from the theoretical background, represented by optimal growth models, models with environment as a factor of production, endogenous growth models and other...

We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

Ideas are different from nearly all other economic goods in that they are nonrivalrous. This nonrivalry implies that production possibilities are likely to be characterized by increasing returns to scale, an insight that has profound implications for economic growth. The purpose of this chapter...