home courses economic growth and environment
Economic Growth and Environment
Description
In introductory courses of macroeconomics investmens are treated only as
part of the demand side of the economy but not as a factor building up the
capital stock and the future production possibilities of an economy. The
basic dynamic relationship between the incentive to save and the process
of capital accumulation is considered in the course
"Advanced Macroeconmics".
The topic of the present lecture is the extension to growth and the environment.
Two subject ares are treated in order to take a closer look at the relationship between
economic growth an the natural environment.
Can non-renewable resources like crude oil, natural gas or Lithium limit economic growth or even let economies shrink
over time? Are there sustainable growth paths that give future generations the
same economic opportunities as past generations? What are the policies that let
an economy follow such paths?
The second topic of the course analyzes the role of renewable resources. Here the environmental condition is of great importance.
The production process often causes severe damages of air, water and other environmental media through noxious emission.
However, this pollution can also be reduced or even prevented via adequate (sometimes costly) corporate actions.
Besides, environmental media posess a certain ability to regenerate wherefore again the search for optimal policy decisions appears on the agenda.
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Non-renewable versus renewable resources
- Empirical evidence
- Optimality concepts
- Non-renewable resources
- Sustainable consumption paths and the Hartwick rule
- Resource augmenting technical progress
- Limits of economic growth
- Renewable resources
- The green Solow Model
- Intragenerational external effects of resource usage
- Intergenerational external effects of resource usage
- Entropy, human resources and sustainable growth
Reading List
- Dasgupta, Partha and Geoffrey Heal, Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1979
- Maußner, Alfred and Rainer Klump, Wachstumstheorie, Springer: Berlin 1996
- Turnovsky, Stephen J., Methods of macroeconomic dynamics, 2nd ed., MIT Press: Cambridge, MA u. a., 2000
