The World Economy, Population Growth, and the Global Ecosystem (eBook)

The purpose of this study is to better understand the essential interdependencies between the world economy and the global ecosystem, including human populations. World production, product prices, wages, interest rates, exchange rates, employment, and spending are shown to be mutually determined over time with the growth rates of country-specific renewable resources, the generation of waste, human population growth, waste assimilation by the basic fungible resource, and the sanitation and other health and human services provided by the government sectors. Particular attention is paid to alternative central bank policies and their potential effects upon future mixes of resources in world production and upon the level and composition of that production. Materials balance holds with respect to all production and consumption. Cash flow constraints hold with respect to all economic transactions; in particular, the decisions to save and invest are directly linked to financial market decisions.

HARLAND WM. WHITMORE, JR. is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Cincinnati, USA. He has published several books in open economy macroeconomics, including Aggregate Economic Choice (1986), World Economy Macroeconomics (1997) and Global Environmental Economics (1999). For the last several years, he has also consulted with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, working on the integration of the macroeconomy with an ecological system. One outcome of this effort was the publication of a report Integration of an Economy under Imperfect Competition with a Twelve-Cell Ecological Model (EPA/600/R-06/046, July 2006).

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The purpose of this study is to better understand the essential interdependencies between the world economy and the global ecosystem, including human populations. World production, product prices, wages, interest rates, exchange rates, employment, and spending are shown to be mutually determined over time with the growth rates of country-specific renewable resources, the generation of waste, human population growth, waste assimilation by the basic fungible resource, and the sanitation and other health and human services provided by the government sectors. Particular attention is paid to alternative central bank policies and their potential effects upon future mixes of resources in world production and upon the level and composition of that production. Materials balance holds with respect to all production and consumption. Cash flow constraints hold with respect to all economic transactions; in particular, the decisions to save and invest are directly linked to financial market decisions.