The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indefinitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the...

Koopmans’s (Econometrica 28, 287–309) axiomatization of discounted utilitarianism is based on seemingly compelling conditions, yet this criterion leads to hard-to-justify outcomes. The present analysis considers a class of sustainable recursive social welfare functions within Koopmans’s...

In the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion we show the following equivalence: If an efficient path has constant (gross and net of population growth) savings rates, then population growth must be quasi-arithmetic and the path is a maximin or a...