Suchergebnisse

The limits to growth -- Prosperity lost -- Redefining prosperity -- The dilemma of growth -- The myth of decoupling -- The "iron cage" of consumerism -- Flourishing, within limits -- Foundations for the economy of tomorrow -- Towards a "post-growth" macroeconomics -- Governance for prosperity -- A lasting prosperity

The Sustainable Development Commission commented on the Government's Pre-Budget Report, 'Investing in Britain's potential : building our long-term future'. The pre-budget report covers issues such as environmental taxation and the economics of climate change. ; Publisher PDF

The Fashion Handbook explores the varied and diverse aspects of the business, bringing together critical concepts with practical information about the industry's structure and core skills, as well as offering advice on real working practices and providing information about careers and training.--[book cover]

AbstractCan 'health resilience' explain international differences in COVID‐19 mortality? This paper aims to understand the significant diversity in mortality rates between countries in terms of their degree of preparedness for the crisis and the underlying health conditions of the population. We integrate COVID‐19 data from the first year of the pandemic with panel data from 2009 to 2017 for 188 countries around the world in order to investigate international variation in COVID‐19 mortality rates. Country‐level data on health, medical, social and policy variables are compared with COVID‐19 mortality rates, with further controls imposed to adjust for infection rate, population and health spending. The results show that prior health conditions, social deprivation and the demography of the country all have significant effects on the mortality rates associated with the virus. The evidence also suggests that countries with higher levels of health‐related policy targets demonstrated lower levels of mortality during the crisis. Finally, we confirm that social habits such as smoking, alcohol consumption and over‐eating create a highly vulnerable group of individuals who were exposed to a greater risk of mortality during the outbreak.

Community action is a vital strategy in the fight against climate change and has increasingly informed government policy, academic inquiry and grassroots action over the last decade. This timely and engaging volume explores both the promise of community-based action in tackling climate change and some of its limitations. On the one hand, community-based action offers a meaningful way to achieve global targets and an avenue for renewing social relations at the local level. On the other, it challenges fundamental aspects of social organization in the modern economy and sometimes comes into confl

Research suggests that the excessive focus on the acquisition of material goods promoted by our consumer society may be detrimental to well-being. Current Western lifestyles, which promote unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, therefore risk failing to bring citizens the happiness they seek. Csikszentmihalyi suggested that engaging in challenging, flow-conducive activities is a means by which individuals can improve well-being without substantially affecting the environment. In this article, we test this proposal by examining data concerning the daily experiences and well-being of 500 U.S. families. We show that individuals who experience stronger characteristics of flow in their leisure activities tend to have greater momentary well-being, whereas those experiencing flow more frequently report greater retrospective well-being. Moreover, a small negative relationship was found between an activity's flow score and its environmental impact. The analysis allows us to identify a specific group of high-flow, low–environmental impact activities.

Modern western economies (in the Eurozone and elsewhere) face a number of challenges over the coming decades. Achieving full employment, meeting climate change and other key environmental targets, and reducing inequality rank amongst the highest of these. The conventional route to achieving these goals has been to pursue economic growth. But this route has created two critical problems for modern economies. The first is that higher growth leads (ceteris parabis) to higher environmental impact. The second is that fragility in financial balances has accompanied relentless demand expansion. The prevailing global response to the first problem has been to encourage a decoupling of output from impacts by investing in green technologies (green growth). But this response runs the risk of exacerbating problems associated with the over-leveraging of households, firms and governments and places undue confidence in unproven and imagined technologies. An alternative approach is to reduce the pace of growth and to restructure economies around green services (post-growth). But the potential dangers of declining growth rates lie in increased inequality and in rising unemployment. Some more fundamental arguments have also been made against the feasibility of interest-bearing debt within a post-growth economy. The work described in this paper was motivated by the need to address these fundamental dilemmas and to inform the debate that has emerged in recent years about the relative merits of green growth and post-growth scenarios. In pursuit of this aim we have developed a suite of macroeconomic models based on the methodology of Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent (SFC) system dynamics. Taken together these models represent the first steps in constructing a new macroeconomic synthesis capable of exploring the economic and financial dimensions of an economy confronting resource or environmental constraints. Such an ecological macroeconomics includes an account of basic macroeconomic variables such as the GDP, consumption, investment, saving, public spending, employment, and productivity. It also accounts for the performance of the economy in terms of financial balances, net lending positions, money supply, distributional equity and financial stability. This report illustrates the utility of this new approach through a number of specific analyses and scenario explorations. These include an assessment of the Piketty hypothesis (that slow growth increases inequality), an analysis of the "growth imperative" hypothesis (that interest bearing debt requires economic growth for stability), and an analysis of the financial and monetary implications of green investment policies. The work also assesses the scope for fiscal policy to improve social and environmental outcomes.