Geir B. Asheim

Does NNP growth indicate welfare improvement

We show that instantaneous increases in real NNP over time are an accurate indicator of true dynamic welfare improvements. This highlights a connection between the theory of green (or comprehensive) national income accounting and the theory of real price indices.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Justifying Social Discounting: The Rank-Discounted Utilitarian Approach

The popular discounted utilitarian criterion for infinite horizon social choice has been criticized on the ground that it treats successive generations unfairly. I propose to evaluate intergenerational welfare with a rank- discounted utilitarian (RDU) criterion instead. The criterion amounts to discounted utilitarianism on non-decreasing paths, but it treats all generations impartially: discounting becomes the mere expression of intergenerational inequality aversion. I show that more inequality averse RDU societies have higher social discount rates when future generations are better-off. I apply the RDU approach in two benchmark economic growth models and I prove that it promotes sustainable policies maximizing discounted utility.

Sustainability and Discounted Utilitarianism in Models of Economic Growth

Discounted utilitarianism treats generations unequally and leads to seemingly unappealing consequences in some models of economic growth. Instead, this paper presents and applies sustainable discounted utilitarianism (SDU). SDU respects the interests of future generations and resolves intergenerational conflicts by imposing on discounted utilitarianism that the evaluation be insensitive to the interests of the present generation if the present is better off than the future. An SDU social welfare function always exists. We provide a convenient sufficient condition to identify SDU optima and apply SDU to two well-known models of economic growth. We also investigate the axiomatic basis for SDU.

Green national accounting: why and how?

The present paper gives an overview of the theory of green national accounting. Three purposes of green national accounting (measurement of sustainable income, social welfare, or net social profit) and two measures (Green NNP and Hicksian income) are considered. It is argued that sustainable income and social welfare correspond to different purposes. Under the assumption of no exogenous technological progress, Green NNP is shown to equal Hicksian income if there is a constant interest rate or if consumption is constant. It is established as a general result that sustainable income

Adjusting Green NNP to Measure Sustainability

M. Weitzman provides a foundation for net national product (NNP) as the stationary equivalent of a wealth-maximizing path when there is a constant interest rate and no exogenous technological progress. Here, the implications of Weitzmans foundation are explored in a case encountered in resource models, i.e., the case of nonconstant interest rates. In a setting that allows for exogenous technological progress, an expression for NNP is obtained that adjusts Green NNP for anticipated capital gains and interest rate effects to produce a measure that indicates sustainability. This result is important when measuring the relative sustainability of resource rich and resource-poor countries. Copyright 1997 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.

Green National Accounting for Welfare and Sustainability: A Taxonomy of Assumptions and Results

This paper summarizes assumptions made and results obtained in parts of the literature on welfare and sustainability accounting. I consider five different assumptions that can be imposed independently of each other, producing 32 different combinations. This taxonomy is used to organize results in welfare and sustainability accounting. The analysis illustrates how stronger results require stronger assumptions and thereby impose harder informational requirements.

Resolving Distributional Conflicts Between Generations

We describe a new approach to the problem of resolving distributional conflicts between an infinite and countable number of generations. We impose conditions on the social preferences that capture the following idea: If preference (or indifference) holds between truncated paths for infinitely many truncating times, then preference (or indifference) holds also between the untruncated infinite paths. In this framework we use such conditions to (1) characterize different versions of leximin and utilitarianism by means of equity conditions well-known from the finite setting, and (2) illustrate the problem of combining Strong Pareto and impartiality in an intergenerational setting.

The Hartwick Rule: Myths and Facts

We shed light on the Hartwick rule for capital accumulation and resource depletion by providing semantic clarifications and investigating the implications and relevance of this rule. We extend earlier results by establishing that the Hartwick rule does not indicate sustainability and does not require substitutability between man-made and naturalcapital. We use a new class of simple counterexamples (i) to obtain the novel finding that a negative value of net investments need not entail that utility is unsustainable, and (ii) to point out deficiencies in the literature.

UNJUST INTERGENERATIONAL ALLOCATIONS

Abstract An intergenerational allocation is defined to be unjust if there is a feasible allocation with more total consumption and less relative inequality. Unjust allocations are characterized in technologies satisfying certain regularity conditions. After ruling out unjust allocations, the consequences of letting generations choose according to a standard form of altruistic preferences are explored in to particular classes of technologies. A connection between excluding unjust allocations and maximizing the welfare of the worst off generation is established in these technologies.

A General Approach to Welfare Measurement through National Income Accounting

We develop a framework for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, e.g., both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national income accounting, which were previously ascribed only to the discounted utilitarian case, in fact extend to this more general framework. In particular, it holds under a wide range of circumstances that real NNP growth (or equivalently, a positive value of net investments) indicates welfare improvement. We illustrate the applicability of our approach by considering resource allocation mechanisms in the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow model of capital accumulation and resource depletion.