IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lis/liswps/524.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Raising Utility and Lowering Risk through Adaptive Sustainability: Society and the Risk of Wealth Inequity in Western Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Andrich
  • Jorg Imberger
  • Ronald Oxburgh

Abstract

The Index of Sustainable Functionality (ISF) makes it possible to analyse domains and the sustainability of multiple systems from various perspectives. This paper uses available household wealth and income data to calculate the resource rich state of Western Australia’s ISF from different wealth level perspectives. How wealth inequity may affect the stability of major systems including the social, terrestrial, water and mineral industry are discussed as are reasons behind recent changes in wealth distribution. The ISF results show that from the perspective of society’s richest 20%, poorest 20%, mean wealth households and the environment, system decline has occurred over the past 20 years, even as the economy reached full functionality. Suggestions to improve functionality and long-term stability are made, with the major suggestion the introduction of a fund modelled on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Andrich & Jorg Imberger & Ronald Oxburgh, 2009. "Raising Utility and Lowering Risk through Adaptive Sustainability: Society and the Risk of Wealth Inequity in Western Australia," LIS Working papers 524, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    • Handle: RePEc:lis:liswps:524
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/524.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. A. B. Atkinson & A. Brandolini, 2009. "On data: a case study of the evolution of income inequality across time and across countries," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 33(3), pages 381-404, May.
    2. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Marc Mezard, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Science & Finance (CFM) working paper archive 500026, Science & Finance, Capital Fund Management.
    3. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2006. "The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(2), pages 200-205, May.
    4. Nourry, Myriam, 2008. "Measuring sustainable development: Some empirical evidence for France from eight alternative indicators," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 441-456, October.
    5. Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe & Mézard, Marc, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 282(3), pages 536-545.
    6. Jeremy Ginsberg & Matthew H. Mohebbi & Rajan S. Patel & Lynnette Brammer & Mark S. Smolinski & Larry Brilliant, 2009. "Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data," Nature, Nature, vol. 457(7232), pages 1012-1014, February.
    7. John Creedy & Li Tan, 2007. "The Relationship between Personal Income and Net Worth in Australia," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 40(2), pages 165-181, June.
    8. Lawn, Philip A. & Sanders, Richard D., 1999. "Has Australia surpassed its optimal macroeconomic scale? Finding out with the aid of 'benefit' and 'cost' accounts and a sustainable net benefit index," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 213-229, February.
    9. Anthony B. Atkinson & Andrew Leigh, 2007. "The Distribution of Top Incomes in Australia," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 83(262), pages 247-261, September.
    10. Torras, Mariano & Boyce, James K., 1998. "Income, inequality, and pollution: a reassessment of the environmental Kuznets Curve," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 147-160, May.
    11. Costanza, Robert & Patten, Bernard C., 1995. "Defining and predicting sustainability," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 193-196, December.
    12. Krajnc, Damjan & Glavic, Peter, 2005. "How to compare companies on relevant dimensions of sustainability," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 551-563, December.
    13. Ye, Qiang, 2008. "Commodity booms and their impacts on the Western Australian economy: The iron ore case," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 83-101, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stojkoski, Viktor & Karbevski, Marko & Utkovski, Zoran & Basnarkov, Lasko & Kocarev, Ljupco, 2021. "Evolution of cooperation in networked heterogeneous fluctuating environments," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 572(C).
    2. Venkatasubramanian, Venkat & Luo, Yu & Sethuraman, Jay, 2015. "How much inequality in income is fair? A microeconomic game theoretic perspective," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 435(C), pages 120-138.
    3. E. Samanidou & E. Zschischang & D. Stauffer & T. Lux, 2001. "Microscopic Models of Financial Markets," Papers cond-mat/0110354, arXiv.org.
    4. Kočišová, J. & Horváth, D. & Brutovský, B., 2009. "The efficiency of individual optimization in the conditions of competitive growth," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 388(17), pages 3585-3592.
    5. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    6. Lawn, Philip & Clarke, Matthew, 2010. "The end of economic growth? A contracting threshold hypothesis," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(11), pages 2213-2223, September.
    7. Bertram During & Nicos Georgiou & Enrico Scalas, 2016. "A stylized model for wealth distribution," Papers 1609.08978, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2021.
    8. Yougui Wang & Ning Ding, 2005. "Dynamic Process of Money Transfer Models," Papers physics/0507162, arXiv.org.
    9. Tamotsu Onozaki, 2018. "Nonlinearity, Bounded Rationality, and Heterogeneity," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-4-431-54971-0, September.
    10. Smerlak, Matteo, 2016. "Thermodynamics of inequalities: From precariousness to economic stratification," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 441(C), pages 40-50.
    11. Marco Raberto & Silvano Cincotti & Sergio Focardi & Michele Marchesi, 2003. "Traders' Long-Run Wealth in an Artificial Financial Market," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 22(2), pages 255-272, October.
    12. Weisbuch, Gérard & Battiston, Stefano, 2007. "From production networks to geographical economics," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 64(3-4), pages 448-469.
    13. Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez & Emmanuel Chavez & Gerardo Esquivel, 2017. "Growth is (really) good for the (really) rich," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(12), pages 2639-2675, December.
    14. Cabral, René & García-Díaz, Rocío & Mollick, André Varella, 2016. "Does globalization affect top income inequality?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 38(5), pages 916-940.
    15. Jiong Liu & R. A. Serota, 2023. "Rethinking Generalized Beta family of distributions," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 96(2), pages 1-14, February.
    16. Nicolli, Francesco & Gilli, Marianna & Vona, Francesco, 2022. "Inequality and Climate Change: Two Problems, One Solution?," FEEM Working Papers 329340, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    17. Geoff Willis & Juergen Mimkes, 2004. "Evidence for the Independence of Waged and Unwaged Income, Evidence for Boltzmann Distributions in Waged Income, and the Outlines of a Coherent Theory of Income Distribution," Microeconomics 0408001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Hu, Feng-Rung, 2008. "On the estimation of the power-law exponent in the mean-field Bouchaud–Mézard model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(18), pages 4605-4614.
    19. G. Willis, 2004. "Laser Welfare: First Steps in Econodynamic Engineering," Papers cond-mat/0408227, arXiv.org.
    20. Goykhman, Mikhail, 2017. "Wealth dynamics in a sentiment-driven market," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 488(C), pages 132-148.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lis:liswps:524. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Piotr Paradowski (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lisprlu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.