World without end : economics, environment, and sustainable development

This book advances a practical approach to finding a balance between maintaining economic growth and preserving the environment and natural resources. It offers an economic argument for considering the environmental costs of economic activity. The authors say that economic development and care for the environment are inevitably complementary in the long term. Drawing heavily on existing literature and unpublished World Bank research, the book contains three parts. Part One: Sustainable Development explores the rise of the environment as a policy issue and its relation to economics. It defines sustainable development and investigates ways of quantifying environmental damage and benefit. Part Two: Resource Degradation: Causes and Policy Responses investigates links between population, resource consumption, and the environment. It explains how market theory has failed to account for depletion of resources and the social factors in environmental degradation. It also shows how planned economies and market interventions, such as subsidized energy prices, can distort true costs. Part Three: International Environmental Issues examines commodity trade, structural adjustment lending as a tool for sustainable development, and "transfrontier" issues, such as acid rain and pollution of the oceans. The authors discuss various methods of control and compensation to deal with global environmental threats.