期刊名称：Discussion Paper / Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université Catholique de Louvain
印刷版ISSN：1379-244X
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：Université catholique de Louvain
摘要：We propose an endogenous growth model of a decentralized economy subject to environmental
constraints. In a basic version, we consider an economy where nal production requires some material
input and where research activities allow simultaneously productive rms to reduce the dependency
of their production process on this input and to improve the quality of their output. We adopt
a material balance approach and, in spite of the optimistic assumption that the material input is
perfectly recyclable (and thus never exhausted), we show that material output growth is always
a transitory phenomenon. When it exists, a balanced growth path is necessarily characterized by
constant values of the material variables, long term economic growth taking exclusively the form of
perpetual improvements in the quality of consumption goods. The material resource constraint is not
solely a long term issue since it is also shown to a
ect the whole transitory dynamics of the (material)
growth process. Renewable energy is introduced in an extension of our basic model. This extension
does not a
ect qualitatively the features of a feasible balanced growth path but make its conditions
of existence more restrictive.
