Sustainable exploitation of a natural resource: a satisfying use of Chichilnisky's criterion

Chichilnisky's criterion for sustainability has the merit to be, so far, the unique explicit, complete and continuous social welfare criterion that combines successfully the requirement of Weak Pareto with an instrumental notion of intergenerational equity (no dictatorship of the present and no dictatorhsip of the future). But it has one important drawback: in the context of renewable resources, there exists no exploitation path that maximizes this criterion. The present article suggests a way to cope with this weakness. We give good reasons to restrict admissible controls to the set of convex combinations between the discounted utilitarian program and the golden rule program. It is shown that optimal paths in this set exists under rather weak sufficient conditions on the fundamentals of the problem.