AbstractsEconomics

The last few decades have seen the construction of detailed and accurate databases that account the natural resources flows enter into the economic system. These updated datasets and resources accounting frameworks, such as the widely used Material Flow Analysis (MFA), provide nowadays the opportunity for an empirical validation of the early theoretical contributions to the investigation of the natural resources-economy link. Essentially, the underling optimism of the contemporary literature that investigates the so-called Decoupling effect could be seen, to some extent, as the empirical revival of the historical debate between Solow and Georgescu-Roegen, concerning the impact of the scarcity of natural resources on economic growth. The contemporary literature on decoupling asserts that there is a gradual de-link between the consumption of resources and economic growth, supporting to some extent the “technology optimists” of the weak sustainability school of thought. Evidently, this conclusion is empirically confirmed for the vast majority of developed, as well as for many developing, economies. However, despite the estimated decoupling trends in most cases examined, there is another inconvenient empirical estimate which essentially questions the decoupling potentials: the social/industrial metabolism, namely the per capita resources consumption, is dramatically increasing for the vast majority of the examined (developed and developing) economies (with Japan, the UK, and Germany being some notable exceptions). Furthermore, these increasing per capita consumption trends are based more and more on nonrenewable resources. Based on this contradiction between the estimated decoupling and per capita consumption trends, the present dissertation aspires to question the decoupling potentials of the economic process. To this end, the thesis adopts the Material Flow Analysis (MFA) methodological framework and the most up-to-date datasets on resources flows, in order to establish and evaluate a new decoupling evaluation framework, as an alternative and complementary to the already existing one. The proposed theoretical conception incorporates, for the first time in the history of the relevant literature, the importance of the demographic dynamics in the decoupling estimates, while it shapes the argument of the biophysical human scale as a crucial threshold for the dematerialization potentials of an economy. According to the results of the present study, there is less optimism concerning the decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources, since its alternative empirical estimates assert that energy and mass resources are coupled with the economic system, once the economic output is envisioned at the downscaled level of the per capita economic welfare-utility. Το ζήτημα της σπανιότητας των φυσικών πόρων αποτελεί ένα θέμα μείζονος σημασίας, ειδικά αν ειδωθεί μέσα στο πλαίσιο της οικονομικής ανάπτυξης και ευημερίας. Ιστορικά, η νεοκλασική οικονομική θεωρία αγνοούσε συστηματικά την καθοριστική συμβολή των φυσικών…