2002 World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists

In this paper we present a trend analysis of a measure of Sustainable National Income (SNI), which corrects Net National Income (NNI) for the costs to bring back environmental resource use to a ‘sustainable’ level. The SNI measure is calculated for the Netherlands, for the years 1990 and 1995. We show that economic growth per se is unsustainable, in the sense that the growth of the SNI-measure does not catch up with the growth in NNI, if we only consider economic expansion over the period 1990-1995 while disregarding compositional and technological change. The Dutch economy has, however, moved towards sectors less dependent on resource use, and technological change allowed less environment intensive production. The numerical calculations show that this resulted in a proportional growth of the SNI measure, i.e., SNI as a percentage of NNI has almost remained constant. We conclude from this that the sources of growth were sustainable over the period 1990-1995.



	Paper Title:	Is Economic Growth Sustainable? A Trend Analysis For The Netherlands, 1990-1995
	Presenting Author:	Marjan Hofkes (Vrije Universiteit)
	Coauthor 1:	Reyer Gerlagh
	Coauthor 2:	W Lise
	Coauthor 3:	Harmen Verbruggen
	Abstract:	In this paper we present a trend analysis of a measure of Sustainable National Income (SNI), which corrects Net National Income (NNI) for the costs to bring back environmental resource use to a ‘sustainable’ level. The SNI measure is calculated for the Netherlands, for the years 1990 and 1995. We show that economic growth per se is unsustainable, in the sense that the growth of the SNI-measure does not catch up with the growth in NNI, if we only consider economic expansion over the period 1990-1995 while disregarding compositional and technological change. The Dutch economy has, however, moved towards sectors less dependent on resource use, and technological change allowed less environment intensive production. The numerical calculations show that this resulted in a proportional growth of the SNI measure, i.e., SNI as a percentage of NNI has almost remained constant. We conclude from this that the sources of growth were sustainable over the period 1990-1995.
	Link to paper:	Not available

	Session / Day / Time	15B / Thursday / 10:15 - 11:45 am

	Please use your browser's "back" button to get to the previous page.