Weak versus Strong Sustainability
Substitution Between Different Kinds of Capital Stock
From the last chapter, it is evident that genuine investment refers to a non-decreasing stock of social wealth across generations, where social wealth is the value of the net sum of different types of productive assets available to a generation at a given point of time. All productive assets are assumed to be equally important for social wellbeing, and because the sustainability condition only requires the net sum of the assets to be non-decreasing, it is assumed that one could be substituted for the other. Many economists like Solow (1993) and Dasgupta (2001) have argued that it is neither important nor feasible to bequeath exactly the same items ...
Get Economics of Sustainable Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
