Expectations and information about the growth of GDP per capita have a large influence on decisions made by private and public economic agents. It will be argued here that GDP (per capita) is far from a robust indicator of social welfare, and that its use as such must be regarded as a serious...

This paper argues that evolutionary thinking and modeling can contribute to the emerging research on sustainability transitions and their management. Evolutionary theory provides a range of concepts and mechanisms that are useful in making existing theorizing about transitions more precise and...

Many well-intended climate-energy strategies are ineffective in the absence of serious environmental regulation. This holds, among others, for direct support of clean energy, voluntary energy conservation, technical standards on a limited set of products, unilateral stringent carbon pricing, and...

It is well-known that energy conservation can lead to rebound effects that partly offset the original energy savings. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy savings on energy intensive goods or services. We calculate the average magnitude of this...

Standard economic theory regards capital and labour as the main factors of production that satisfy the “cost-share theorem”. This paper argues that when a third factor, namely energy, is added physical constraints on substitution among the factors arise. We show that energy is a much more...

This timely and important Handbook takes stock of progress made in our understanding of what sustainable development actually is and how it can be achieved. Twenty years on from the publication of the seminal Brundtland Report, it has become clear that formidable challenges confront policy...

This article examines the potential effects of peak oil on Spanish tourism and indirectly on the rest of the economy. We construct several scenarios of price increases in oil, related fossil fuels and their inflationary effects. These scenarios provide the context for an input–output (I/O)...