Weak Sustainability at Regional Scale

Weak sustainability (WS) requires that the inclusive wealth (IW) of a place (e.g., the world, a nation, or a sub-national region) be non-decreasing over a long time. The WS framework provides a more complete account of the sustainability of a place than do sustainability indicators or conventional economic measures, such as gross domestic product. However, while many decisions that affect sustainability are made at regional and local levels, the abstract theory of WS was developed without explicit recognition of the porosity of geographic boundaries and the interdependencies of regions. In this paper, we make three contributions: a carefully reasoned defense of IW per capita as the WS criterion, an improved understanding of the relationship between mobility, labor productivity, and regional economic growth, and an empirical application to US counties that demonstrates the feasibility of empirical regional WS assessment by summarizing Jones’ research. This analysis, extending the framework developed by Arrow and co-authors, accounts for more region-specific factors related to population, most notably the labor productivity component of health capital, and assesses IW per capita for all 50 states and 3108 counties in the US from 2010 to 2017. These improved methods revealed substantially more states and counties that were not WS relative to results using the Arrow et al. framework. The not-WS counties exhibited a distinct rural bias, as regional scientists have suspected but, nevertheless, the majority of rural counties were WS. Our work demonstrated that regional WS assessment is feasible, produces results that are consistent with prior expectations based on reasoning and empirical research, and has the potential to provide fresh insights into longstanding questions of regional development.