Environmental economics assumes that reliance on price signals, adjusted for externalities, normally leads to efficient solutions to environmental problems. We explore a limiting case, when market volatility created “mixed signals”: waste paper and other recycled materials were briefly worth...

Market based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world’s environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an “efficient” allocation of society’s resources. As a...

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution- intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the “pollution haven” hypothesis, is...

This paper describes an alternative paradigm, "contextual economics," which is being developed, initially, in the form of an introductory microeconomics textbook. This paradigm gives special attention to the goals of economic actors and of the discipline of economics; and to the physical and the...

Macroeconomic theory has not yet come to grips with major issues of the twenty- first century. These include environmental pressures, demographic changes, the size, structure, and power of multinational corporations, and growing economic inequality. Existing macroeconomic theory also does not...

Macroeconomic theory and policy are strongly based on the assumption that economic growth is a fundamental goal. The environmental realities of the twenty- first century compel a reassessment of macro theory in terms of the impact of current growth patterns on planetary ecosystems.This paper...

The concept of capital has a number of different meanings. It is useful to differentiate between five kinds of capital: financial, natural, produced, human, and social. All are stocks that have the capacity to produce flows of economically desirable outputs. The maintenance of all five kinds of...