Measuring sustainable well-being is an important task in determining whether people's lives are improving or becoming worse over time. A new index, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), has been developed in order to measure sustainable well-being. The GPI is comprised of a large number of...

Australia has recorded consistently strong levels of economic growth in recent times. Under conventional considerations, the well-being experienced by Australians would also be considered to have increased in equal terms over this period. This is because aggregate standard national accounts have...

For some time now, ecological economists have been putting forward a ‘threshold hypothesis’ – the notion that when macroeconomic systems expand beyond a certain size, the additional cost of growth exceeds the flow of additional benefits. In order to support their belief, ecological...

Andrew Brennan (Ecological Economics, 2013--this issue) has argued that the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) and Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) are theoretically flawed because, as indicators designed to capture the net psychic income generated by economic activity, they fail to...

In conventional terms, the optimal price, extraction quantity, and depletion time of a non-renewable resource is based on the Hotelling (1931) Rule-also referred as Malthusian Flow Scarcity conditions. Since any measure of resource scarcity should account for the need to sustain...

For nearly a decade, a small number of economists have been promoting a Job Guarantee to achieve full employment (Mitchell and Watts, 1997; Wray, 1998). As an ecological economist, I have also been a recent supporter of the Job Guarantee on the basis that: (a) the macroeconomics of the Job Guarantee...

It is generally believed that when a resource becomes increasingly scarce, a shadow is automatically cast in the form of a higher market price. The higher price induces substitution towards more abundant resources and the development of resource-saving technological progress. A growing number of...

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...

This paper revisits the natural capital/human-made capital substitutability debate by putting forward a production function incorporating the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Use of this alternative production function shows that, where relevant, the elasticity of substitution between...