Atkinson, Giles David; (2001) Sustainable development: Economics and measurement. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis is an investigation of the issues that arise in the measurement of sustainable development. It uses as its over-arching framework the theory of extended or green national accounting but this is augmented by other methods and techniques. In Chapter 1, we introduce the concept of sustainable development and discuss proposals regarding how sustainability is to be achieved and measured; in particular, the genuine savings rate (savings net of asset consumption) and its caveats. In Chapter 2, we extend the analysis of genuine savings to the depletion of forests in the developing world. We examine both in theory and in practice the accounting problem for the conversion of forest land to slash-and-bum agriculture in the Peruvian Amazon. In Chapter 3, we consider the effect of international trade on sustainable development. By modelling these trade flows using Input-Output analysis we identify countries that can be characterised as net producers or net consumers of (global) resources. In Chapter 4, our starting point is the proposition that if corporate sustainability has relevance to the wider sustainability debate, it is via corporate full cost accounting. We illustrate one candidate indicator that can provide the desirable signal that as the firm's external impact diminishes the more 'sustainable' it is indicated to be. In Chapter 5, we examine the so-called "resource curse hypothesis". We investigate this question using cross-country regressions and offer statistical support for the view that countries where growth has lagged are those where there is a combination of natural resource abundance and deficient public policy. In Chapter 6 we turn to the notion of strong sustainability. In particular, we evaluate candidate indicators that have been proposed to reflect this concern via a specific focus on the conservation of natural assets. Finally, in Chapter 7 we explore the meaning of equity in an intragenerational context. Using a contingent ranking methodology, trade-offs between competing notions of environmental equity are investigated. The results indicate that these trade-offs do exist and, furthermore, are significant.

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