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New Thinking on Sustainable Development and Growth

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New Challenges for Macroeconomic Policies

Abstract

This chapter discusses some of the research avenues needed to consider in a new way the issues of sustainable growth and development in industrialized countries. It presents the ideas in vogue in several fields of the literature still in their infancy. The first one concerns the global approach of sustainability phenomena. It is necessary to decompartmentalize economic models by proposing an integrated (transdisciplinary) approach to the analysis of growth and development and of the equilibrium of other physical or living ecosystems. Secondly, sustainability necessarily implies a socio-historical dimension, which means that we must understand how politics, history, social anthropology, economics, and geopolitics combine to give rise to stable economic and sociopolitical equilibria. Thirdly, it is the construction of a social contract accepted by all its members that defines the common objectives on which the sustainability of growth rests in the short term but also in the medium/long term: eliminating poverty by facilitating access to primary goods for all, fighting against dynastic inequalities by reducing inequalities, and preserving resources for future generations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The first version of the Meadows report on the limits to economic growth dates from 1972 and evokes the possibility of a stationary state of the economies characterized by a growth rate that would become equal to 0, because of two factors, that is, demography in certain countries and the depletion of underground resources. The authors developed a planetary model, called World3, which includes several other dimensions in addition to growth: demographics, available reserves in the subsoil, pollution.

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  1. Sciences Po Aix, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Gilles Dufrénot

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  1. Gilles Dufrénot
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Dufrénot, G. (2023). New Thinking on Sustainable Development and Growth. In: New Challenges for Macroeconomic Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15754-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15754-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15753-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15754-7

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