Towards sustainable lignite consumption in Turkey and a welfare analysis

Sustainable consumption is at the center of sustainable development that every country seems to want. One of the great challenges of this century must be to understand what drives the consumption and how we can reduce consumption through increased efficiency. However consumption is not simply determined by population growth, which is commonly assumed to be a key cause of unsustainable consumption, but also by economic activity, technology choices, social values, institutions and policies. In this paper, we focus our analysis on lignite consumption in Turkey as an exhaustible natural resource and we assume that the consumption is only the ultimate end of the economic activity. Some improvments of the Weitzman model (1976) are proposed by introducing an environmental preference parameter into the model to complement his interpretation of welfare. Our aim is to pass from theory to practical applications by presenting some modest empirical results. Our model is constructed under GAMS for the period 1980-2080 using Turkish data and leads to the interesting result that an environmental taxation policy can lead to a social welfare increase in Turkey.