Abstract:

As announced in our previous works, this paper is part of a larger research that deals with sustainable development and environmental protection in extractive industry. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to show how economists think about sustainability. We also consider the way in which ecologists think about sustainability (and reveal it in our next paper). We will not be considering whether or not sustainability should be a policy objective. That is the sort of ethical question that other previous paper addressed. Here we will take it as given that sustainability is desirable, that it is agreed that the current human generation should take account of the interests of future human generations. The first question that then arises is: what are the interests of future generations? The next question then is: how do we look after those interests? This second question itself involves two stages. First, we deal with identifying current policy objectives that look after future interests. Second, we deal with devising policy instruments to achieve those objectives. But this paper deals mainly with mapping the interests of future generations into current policy objectives and it addresses questions about instruments only in a very general way. Hence, much of the rest of papers will be concerned with more detailed analysis of such questions.