Is there a thermodynamic constraint on economic activity?

• Authors: Bartus Gabor
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

Many people have enquired, since environmental problems came to the fore, why economics does not deal with estimation of the optimal scale of the economy, though the limits to the Earth's material resources mean the size of its economy cannot increase indefinitely. The ecological school of economics have sought a requisite scientific basis for such measurement in the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law). The study concludes first that economics takes cognizance of many scientific constraints during its investigations - though these conclusions are not emphatic - and secondly that the desirable aggregate measures of economic activity (if there should exist such an optimum, which is not dealt with here) can certainly not be proved through the second law of thermodynamics

Keywords

EN

BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION; BIOECONOMICS; ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS; ECONOMICS & OTHER DISCIPLINES; ECOSYSTEM SERVICES; ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS; INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

Discipline

• ECONOMICS: ECONOMICS

• Publisher: Committee for Economic Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Kozgazdasagi Szemle (Economic Review)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 55
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 1010-1022
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Bartus Gabor

• Gabor Bartus, no address given, contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA078712