IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0387.html

Time as a Structural Barrier for a Circular Economy

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Circular economy debates often acknowledge material lifespans and delays, but time is usually treated as a contextual issue rather than a structural barrier. The contribution is to reframe circular economy transitions as intertemporal processes by treating time as an endogenous structural barrier. A framework is developed that classifies goods into short-, medium-, and long-lived categories, demonstrating how lagged inflows and valuation biases suppress aggregate circularity even when technology improves. By making temporal mechanisms explicit, the analysis explains why indicators remain stagnant despite policy and efficiency gains. The contribution is to introduce time as an endogenous barrier, integrating insights from environmental and resource economics into circular economy theory and showing how delayed substitution shapes both firm investment and policy outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Grafström, Jonas, 2025. "Time as a Structural Barrier for a Circular Economy," Ratio Working Papers 387, The Ratio Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0387
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cms.ratio.se/app/uploads/2025/11/working-paper-387.pdf
    File Function: Working Paper 387
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination
    • O41 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - One, Two, and Multisector Growth Models
    • Q20 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - General
    • Q50 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - General
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:hhs:ratioi:0387. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Martin Korpi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ratiose.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.