Quantifying environmental sustainability using an aggregate index reflecting increasing marginal damage costs

In an environmental economics context increasing marginal damage costs are usually assumed, and a methodology for calculating a sustainability index in accordance with this assumption is presented. The aggregate index is constructed from an n-element vector including the values of the (n) subset ind...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied economics letters Vol. 18; no. 14; pp. 1383 - 1386
Main Author Bentzen, Jan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Taylor & Francis 01.09.2011
Taylor and Francis Journals
Taylor & Francis LLC
SeriesApplied Economics Letters
Subjects
Aggregate analysis
Cost analysis
Economic analysis
Environmental economics
Euclidean space
Indexation
Indexes
Marginal costs
Studies
Sustainability
Sustainable development
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Summary:In an environmental economics context increasing marginal damage costs are usually assumed, and a methodology for calculating a sustainability index in accordance with this assumption is presented. The aggregate index is constructed from an n-element vector including the values of the (n) subset indicators, and the length of this vector in Euclidian space is perceived as an alternative measurement scale. Increasing values for any of the elements in the vector will influence the total result more than proportionately and hence in accordance with an assumption of increasing marginal damage costs.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1350-4851
1466-4291
DOI:10.1080/13504851.2010.537626