AN INQUIRY INTO THE SUSTAINABILITY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

In recent years economic sustainability has gained traction among academics and policy makers. However, current measures of economic sustainability often neglect to incorporate a wholistic approach. For instance, the sustainability of human capital and manufactured capital find scant mention in literature. The thesis outlines a theoretical framework for the estimation of economic sustainability. Techniques to estimate the sustainability of the application of natural, human, and manufactured capitals are first presented. Subsequently, the coefficients estimated through these techniques are employed to gauge the sustainability of the economic system. While the current study estimates the sustainability for a small group of countries, it could easily be extended to more economies as green accounting becomes common.