Library

By: Joseph E. Stiglitz

The public-health effects and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in developing and emerging economies are only just becoming apparent, but it is already clear that the toll will be devastating. If the international community wants to avoid a wave of defaults, it must start developing a rescue plan immediately.

By: John Childs

Scripted as a sustainable alternative to terrestrial mining, the licence for the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining (DSM) site was issued in Papua New Guinea in 2011 to extract copper and gold from a deposit situated 1600 m below the surface of the Bismarck Sea. Whilst DSM’s proponents locate it as emergent part of a blue economy narrative, its critics point to the ecological and econ...

By: Sam Butler-Sloss, Marc Beckmann, Lea Trogrlic, Maria João Pimenta

In this new report, the authors try to get a grip on what it takes for the economics profession to treat the climate crisis like the crisis it is. For that, we interviewed nine leading economists - all coming from different geographies and exposing different levels of optimism about the changes that are possible. They include Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Yanis Varoufakis (Helleni...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Jeroen van den Bergh, Tilman Hartley

GDP growth is declining in industrial economies, and there is increasing evidence that growth may be environmentally unsustainable. If growth falls below returns to wealth then inequalities increase, as Thomas Piketty recently showed. This poses a challenge to managing slow and/or negative growth. Here, we examine policies that have been proposed to solve the problem of increasing income inequa...

By: Daniel Horen Greenford

This video is based on findings from our recent study: Greenford, D. H., Crownshaw, T., Lesk, C., Stadler, K., & Matthews, H. D. (2020). Shifting economic activity to services has limited potential to reduce global environmental impacts due to the household consumption of labour. Environmental Research Letters, 15(6), 064019.

By: Ragnheiður Bogadóttir

Blue Growth is promoted as an important strategy for future food security, and sustainable harvesting of marine resources. This paper aims to identify dominating ideologies and strategies of Blue Growth in the Faroe Islands, mainly regarding salmon farming and industrial capture fisheries, and to investigate how these ideologies materialize in the social metabolism of Faroese society. The a...

By: Donnie Maclurcan, Crystal Arnold

Donnie Maclurcan Ph.D. and Crystal Arnold from the Post Growth Institute (http://postgrowth.org) explore how the coronavirus is affecting both global and local economies, and what you can do to help to ensure we manage this moment wisely. Short presentations are followed by questions and answers.

By: Sarah Hafner, Aled Jones, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Irene Monasterolo

Well-known academic and non-academic institutions call for a new approach in economics able to capture features of modern economies including, but not limited to, complexity, non-equilibrium and uncertainty. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of ecological macroeconomic models that are suitable for the investigation of low-carbon energy transitions and assess them based on the feat...

By: Iana Nesterova

Abstract: Recent years have seen a revival in growth scepticism, yet degrowth in relation to the macroeconomic level has received almost exclusive attention. This resulted in a lack of literature on how post-growth and specifically degrowth visions of economy could be implemented, including from the perspective of firms and other organisations. This paper focuses on degrowth literature and fiel...

By: Ryan Gunderson, Diana Stuart, Brian Petersen

Abstract: In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fa...

By: Anke Schaffartzik, Arnim Scheidel

Degrowth and environmental justice movements share overarching aims of sustainability and justice and pursue them through radical social change and resistances. Both movements are diverse and comprised of groups that originate and operate in different contexts. The ever-growing metabolism of the world economy presents an obstacle to both movements' aims, while a socio-metabolic perspective un...

By: Oliver Richters, Andreas Siemoneit

Economic growth remains a prominent political goal, despite its conflicts with ecological sustainability. Are growth policies only a question of political or individual will, or do ‘growth imperatives’ make them inescapable? We structure the debate along two dimensions: (a) degree of coerciveness between free will and coercion, and (b) agents affected. With carefully derived micro level definit...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Richard B. Norgaard, Jessica J. Goddard

Methodological pluralism has been a tenet of ecological economics since the journal's inauguration. Pluralism has fostered collaboration and forged new insights across disciplines. However, to counter the hegemonic voice of mainstream economics and inspire action on climate change and inequality, ecological economics requires coherence to produce meaningful knowledge from diverse research findi...

By: Barry Gils, Jamie Morgan

This Special Editorial on the Climate Emergency makes the case that although we are living in the time of Global Climate Emergency we are not yet acting as if we are in an imminent crisis. The authors review key aspects of the institutional response and climate science over the past several decades and the role of the economic system in perpetuating inertia on reduction of greenhouse gas emissi...

By: Timothée Parrique

What is degrowth and what are its implications for political economy? Divided in three parts, this dissertation explains the why, what and how of degrowth.

By: Shaun Sellers

"A climate policy must change the way that the global economy works if it is to be successful, but if a policy is effective enough to disrupt global trade, it will violate global trade rules."

By: Tim Jackson, Peter A. Victor

This working paper presents a stock-flow consistent (SFC) simulation model of a national economy, calibrated on the basis of Canadian data. LowGrow SFC describes the evolution of the Canadian economy in terms of six financial sectors whose behaviour is based on ‘stylised facts’ in the Post-Keynesian tradition. A key feature of the model is its ability to provide a systematic account, not only o...

By: Iñigo Capellán-Pérez

La validez de la narrativa del crecimiento verde queda muy tocada tras la publicación de un nuevo detallado y riguroso informe científico. El tiempo se agota y la piedra angular de la propuesta del establishment no se ha demostrado como viable en ninguna circunstancia de forma relevante. El Diario, July 8th 2019, Opinión y Blogs

By: Gareth Dale

Radical action on climate change is at last on the agenda. The emphasis is on urgency and action and - for XR notably - ‘truth.’ Questions of long-term strategy are less clear, but strategy platforms have been advanced. Foremost among them are the Green New Deal (GND) and degrowth. This article provides a comparison and sketches lines of convergence  

By: Nick Meynen

In recent years, the concept of green economic growth, i.e. the expansion of the economy without an accompanying increase in environmental harm, has gained political acceptance. However, the idea that this policy alone is enough to deal with the environmental challenges we face appears to be founded on little to no scientific basis. META, the news channel of the European Environmental Bureau...