Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life, and offer solutions to them too. Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different...

Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day-to-day basis by the allocation and use of purely local resources. Yet 'official' development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take account of the dependence of poor countries on...

Transnational commons, cross-border areas without well-defined property rights, have long been ignored in 'official' development economics. This volume redresses the balance by adopting an environmental approach which stresses the importance of shared natural resources and the links between...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...

An outline of what would be ideally needed for a comprehensive set of national accounts is given. National governments and international agencies ought ideally to go even beyond green national accounts. Unfortunately though, that ideal cannot be met, at least not in the near future....

<titre/> This paper sketches a theory explaining why deep poverty has a strong tendency to persist across generations. The author shows that high maintenance costs of good physical and emotional health, which are manifestations of complementarities among the inputs that humans need for survival,...

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a...

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. Although the problem pervades a number of academic disciplines, it is not confined to the academic realm. International organizations regularly publish cross-country estimates of the...