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The Economics of Sustainable Development. Edited by Sisay Asefa. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2005. 191 pp. $15.00. ISBN 0 88099 320 0.
Ever since the 1987 publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development, "sustainable development" has become a recognizable buzzword in the social sciences as well as in popular literature. Because the notion of sustainable development was imprecisely defined when first introduced, it has come to have many meanings and much has been written (of varying levels of quality) about this seemingly elusive concept.
This edited book is about the economics of sustainable development. It consists of an introduction and six chapters that were originally presented at the fortieth annual Werner Sichel Economics Lecture- Seminar Series at Western Michigan University during the 2003-2004 academic year. The introductory chapter states that analyses of sustainable development differ from analyses of economic growth in that the former incorporate "natural resources as a form of natural capital, defined as the value of the existing stock of natural resources such as forests, fisheries, water, mineral deposits, and the environment in general" [1]. This chapter then uses simple algebra to delineate a key criterion in the analytical literature on sustainability- namely, the net savings criterion. As the editor rightly points out, for an economy to be sustainable, net savings must be positive. Put differently, total savings less the depreciation of manufactured, human, and natural capital, must be positive.
The remaining six chapters in this book collectively take an expansive view of the notion of sustainability, and each chapter examines a particular facet of sustainability. These include issues such as the nexus between population growth...