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Lecture

Introduction to environmental and ecological economics

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ENV-610: Ecological economics

This course is an introduction to economic theory applied to environmental issues. It presents the methods used to assess environmental impacts and natural resources as well as environmental regulation instruments. It then broadens the analysis to ecologic ...

Description

This lecture introduces the fundamental concepts of environmental and ecological economics, focusing on the study of how individuals and societies use scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. It covers economic actors, circuits, and key assumptions, distinguishing between environmental and ecological economics. The lecture explores sustainable development, human-centered views, economic production, natural resources, and wealth accounting by the World Bank. It also delves into the moral imperative of protecting the planet, different perspectives on nature, and the conditions for sustainable development, emphasizing the importance of maintaining natural capital. The instructor provides insights into wealth per capita trends and variations across different countries, highlighting the complexities of wealth accumulation and sustainability.

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Related concepts (32)

Distribution of wealth

The distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society. It shows one aspect of economic inequality or economic heterogeneity. The distribution of wealth differs from the income distribution in that it looks at the economic distribution of ownership of the assets in a society, rather than the current income of members of that society. According to the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, "the world distribution of wealth is much more unequal than that of income.

Wealth

Wealth is the abundance of valuable financial assets or physical possessions which can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions. This includes the core meaning as held in the originating Old English word weal, which is from an Indo-European word stem. The modern concept of wealth is of significance in all areas of economics, and clearly so for growth economics and development economics, yet the meaning of wealth is context-dependent. A person possessing a substantial net worth is known as wealthy.

Wealth tax

A wealth tax (also called a capital tax or equity tax) is a tax on an entity's holdings of assets or an entity's net worth. This includes the total value of personal assets, including cash, bank deposits, real estate, assets in insurance and pension plans, ownership of unincorporated businesses, financial securities, and personal trusts (a one-off levy on wealth is a capital levy). Typically, wealth taxation often involves the exclusion of an individual's liabilities, such as mortgages and other debts, from their total assets.

Ecological economics

Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment.

Economic system

An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community. An economic system is a type of social system. The mode of production is a related concept.

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