Introduction
Welfare Economics and Sustainable Development theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Development and Economic Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias.
This theme introduces welfare economics and sustainable development in four topics dealing with four important issues to be considered in implementing sustainable development. These are: the use of ethics and discounting and economic growth models in balancing the interests of future generations against those of the present; the advantages and limitations of national accounting methodologies as means of evaluating sustainability; the international dimensions of sustainable development arising out of environmental and economic linkages among nations; and the nature of institutions required to promote sustainable development.
These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.
Editor(s) Biography
Yew-Kwang Ng, Director of the Centre for Increasing Returns and Economic Organization at Monash University, was born in 1942 in Malaysia. He graduated with a B.Com. from Nanyang University in 1966 and a Ph.D. from Sydney University in 1971. He holds a personal chair at Monash University and is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia since 1980. He has worked in welfare economics, mesoeconomics (a simplified general equilibrium analysis with both micro and macro elements) and welfare biology. He also collaborated with Xiaokai Yang on an inframarginal analysis of division of labour. He has published papers in leading journals in economics as well as in biology, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology and articles in the popular press. Books published include Mesoeconomics: A Micro-Macro Analysis (London: Wheatsheaf, 1986), Specialization and Economic Organization (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1993, with X. Yang), Increasing Returns and Economic Analysis, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1998, with Kenneth Arrow and Xiaokai Yang), Efficiency, Equality, and Public Policy (London: Macmillan, 2000), Welfare Economics: Towards a CompleteAnalysis, (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004).
Ian Wills is Honorary Associate Professor of Economics at Monash University, having retired at the end of 2006. He previously taught in the economics and commerce and graduate environmental science programs at Monash. He has Bachelors and Masters degrees in agricultural science from the University Melbourne and a PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois. His research and writing has dealt with the impacts of the Green Revolution in India and Indonesia, the economics of property rights and transactions costs, farm land preservation, the economics of sustainable development, pollution control policy and the precautionary principle. He is the author of Economics and the Environment: a Signalling and Incentives Approach, first published by Allen and Unwin in 1997 and published in a second edition in 2006
