On the economic growth and environmental trade-off: a multi-objective analysis

Abstract

We develop a multicriteria approach, based on a scalarization technique, in order to analyze the trade off between economic growth and environmental outcomes in a framework in which the economy and environment relation is bidirectional. On the one hand, economic growth by stimulating production activities gives rise to emissions of pollutants which deteriorate the environment. On the other hand, the environment affects economic activities since pollution generates a production externality determining how much output the economy can produce and reducing welfare. In this setting we show that optimality dictates an initial overshooting followed by economic degrowth and rising pollution. This implies that independently of the relative importance of economic and environmental factors, it is paradoxically optimal for the economy to asymptotically reach the maximum pollution level that the environment is able to bear.

A Multicriteria Macroeconomic Model with Intertemporal Equity and Spatial Spillovers

“…The simplest macroeconomic setting to account for intergenerational equity ( [21]; [22]) and spatial links and spillovers ( [6]; [3]) consists of an optimization problem in which the social planner, by considering the evolution of the capital stock K(x, t), tries to determine the optimal level of consumption C(x, t) over time t ∈ [0, T ] and across space x ∈ Ω to maximize the vector-valued social welfare which is composed of two terms. The first term represents the discounted utility stream of the representative individuals located in different venues within the entire spatial economy J 1 = T 0 Ω U (C(x, t))e −ρt dxdt, where the utility function depends on consumption and the discount factor is ρ > 0.…”

“…Different approaches to overcome such an issue have been proposed, but probably the most commonly used consists of extending the objective function to include an additional term representing somehow long term sustainablity considerations ( [12]). The introduction of such an additional term in the optimization problem makes it a multiple objective problem in which the society needs to balance two conflicting goals, represented by short term and long term objectives, respectively; such an interpretation of a macroeconomic problem as a multicriteria problem allows to rely upon the operations research methods to analyze macroeconomic issues, bridging somehow these two important but distinct fields of research ( [21]; [22]).…”

Dynamic immune cooperative scheduling of agricultural machineries

“…There are a few of researches on districting and dynamic cooperative scheduling problems so far, mainly focusing on the evolutionary algorithm (EA) [31][32][33], co-evolutionary algorithm (CEA) [34], goal programming [35], and the Tabu search algorithm (TSA) [36], which can basically solve the corresponding problems. What is more, there have been some researches on scheduling of agricultural machineries [37][38][39][40].…”

Interactive Multiobjective Procedure for Mixed Problems and Its Application to Capacity Planning

“…The term "trade-off" is widely used in decision-making. It usually refers to a conflict between two criteria [30][31][32]. The notion "value trade-offs" is used by Keeney [33] to express how much the DM is inclined to decrease one criterion to achieve a particular increase in another criterion.…”