The Economics of Sustainable Development

This book highlights methodological approaches for the economics of sustainable development and brings together recent empirical work done in India, especially by Dr. Surender Kumar and Dr. Shunsuke Managi. Various chapters in this book use Indian data to show the very wide applicability of methodologies in the theory of production for dealing with many empirical issues of environmentally sustainable development in a developing country. I congratulate the authors for the time and effort devoted to compiling this very useful reference on the subject and the publishers for publishing this volume. The methodologies of cost functions, distance functions, and production fu- tions have been used in many recent studies and in the studies reported in this book for environmental valuation. Environmental valuation is required for designing policy instruments like pollution taxes for sustainable development and for meas- ing green GDP. The UN methodology of integrated environmental and economic accounting provides ways of measuring the cost of maintaining environmental resources at sustainable levels or the maintenance cost for estimating green GDP. Some of the chapters in this book show that the methodology of distance functions could be used for estimating the cost of environmentally sustainable development.