PV-optimality in a capital-resource economy can imply decreasing utility over some portion of the time horizon. Various criteria have been proposed to maintain intergenerational equity defined as nondeclining utility, but these have some limitations and problems. This paper proposes a new welfare criteria incorporating present value to maintain efficiency, and an equity function with convex costs on declining utility. This criterion is economically efficient, time-consistent and recursive. An extension of dynamic programming to multiple value functions is developed to solve this problem. Increasing the equity weight increasingly eliminates declining portions of utility time paths. Sustainability implies increasing consumption in the early time periods and some intermediate time periods relative to PV-optimality. A surprising result is that sustainability can actually result in increased resource usage in early time periods, followed later by higher levels of resource stocks compared to PV-optimality. The sustainability analysis shows that while conventional benefit-cost and valuation analysis contribute to efficiency, they do not necessarily induce sustainability due to incorrect dynamic GE prices. Similar comments apply to Green NNP analysis. The concepts and extended DP methods developed in this paper extend naturally to uncertainty and can also be applied to generalized consumer and social choice models beyond those typically considered in the literature.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) in its series 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA with number
21472.
Length: Date of creation: 2006 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea06:21472
Contact details of provider: Postal: 555 East Wells Street, Suite 1100, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202 Phone: (414) 918-3190 Fax: (414) 276-3349 Email: Web page: http://www.aaea.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (AgEcon Search).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Asheim,G.B. & Buchholz,W. & Tungodden,B., 1999.
"Justifying sustainability,"
Memorandum
08/1999, Oslo University, Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Asheim, G.B. & Buchholz, W. & Tungodden, B., 1999.
"Justifying Sustainability,"
Papers
5/99, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration-.