Exhaustion of a natural resource stock may be a rational choice for an individual and/or a community, even if a sustainable use for the resource is feasible and the resource users are farsighted and well informed on the ecosystem. We identify conditions under which it is optimal not to sustain...

We assume that people value employment not only to earn income to satisfy their consumption needs but also as a means of community/social involvement that provides socio-psychological (non-pecuniary) benefits. We show that the latter incentive can encourage full employment harvesting resources...

This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general "zero-net-aggregate-investment" condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of...

The relationships among the Hamiltonian, NNP, and the level of sustainable consumption/utility have been widely misunderstood. This paper dispels the misconceptions and provides further new insight into these relationships. We show generally that for autonomous dynamic optimizing economies, a...