The Physical Economy of the United States of America

Gierlinger, Sylvia; Krausmann, Fridolin

doi:10.1111/j.1530-9290.2011.00404.x

Cited by 143 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…We have also obtained the physical trade balance (PTB), calculated as imports minus exports, which allows us to determine the net exchange of materials with other countries. Material intensity (MI) is defined as DMC per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) (Gierlinger and Krausman ).…”

Section: Methods and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, despite the important progress brought by the methodology, as it is still recent, there have been very few studies offering a long‐term view. Notable exceptions are the cases of Japan (Krausmann et al ), the United States (Gierlinger and Krausmann ), Czechoslovakia (Kovanda and Hak ; Kuskova et al ), Austria (Krausmann et al ), and England (Schandl and Schulz ), for which long‐term MFA data (covering more than a century) are available.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long‐Term Material Flow Analysis (1860–2010)

Infante-Amate¹,

Soto²,

Aguilera³

et al. 2015

J of Industrial Ecology

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SummaryThe aim of this work is to reconstruct the main economy-wide/material flow accounting indicators for the Spanish economy between 1860 and 2010. The main results indicate that from 1960 onward, the country saw a very rapid industrial transition based on the domestic extraction of quarry products and the import of fossil fuels and manufactured goods. Direct material consumption rose from 58.7 million tonnes (Mt) in 1860 to 570.2 Mt in 2010. In per capita terms, it rose from 2.76 tonnes per capita per year (t/cap/yr) to 11.61 t/cap/year. Of the decennial years studied in this article, a peak of 15.23 t/cap/yr occurs in the year 2000; the subsequent fall is explained by the crisis of 2008. Until 1930, Spain was a net exporter of resources, but since that year, and especially since 1960, it began to depend heavily on overseas resources. The physical trade balance per inhabitant in Spain was -0.01 t/cap/year in 1860 and today it is 2.45 t/cap/year. This process also reveals the change in consumption patterns, which became increasingly dependent on abiotic resources. In 1860, 98.1% of resources consumed was biomass, whereas today the figure is 16.2%. In all events, this article shows how, although the great transformation did not occur until 1960, before that date the country saw significant qualitative transformation, which did not involve relevant changes in the mobilization of resources.

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Section: Methods and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long‐Term Material Flow Analysis (1860–2010)

Infante-Amate¹,

Soto²,

Aguilera³

et al. 2015

J of Industrial Ecology

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show abstract

“…The MFA database maintained at the Institute of Social Ecology provided published and unpublished economy-wide MFA data for a set of countries in Europe, North and Latin America, Africa and Asia. Published data from this source includes data for the EU-15 member states [31], the USA [32], Japan [33], India [34], Brazil [35], and the global total [8]. The second database used was the CSIRO and UNEP dataset which covers countries in the Asian-Pacific region, available online at www.csiro.au/AsiaPacificResourceFlows.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and Dematerialization: An International Study

Krausmann²,

et al. 2013

Self Cite

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Economic development and growth depend on growing levels of resource use, and result in environmental impacts from large scale resource extraction and emissions of waste. In this study, we examine the resource dependency of economic activities over the past several decades for a set of countries comprising developing, emerging and mature industrialized economies. Rather than a single universal industrial development pathway, we find a diversity of economic dependencies on material use, made evident through cluster analysis. We conduct tests for relative and absolute decoupling of the economy from material use, and compare these with similar tests for decoupling from carbon emissions, both for single countries and country groupings using panel analysis. We show that, over the longer term, emerging and developing countries tend to have significantly larger material-economic coupling than mature industrialized economies (although this effect may be enhanced by trade patterns), but that the contrary is true for short-term coupling. Moreover, we demonstrate that absolute dematerialization limits economic growth rates, while the successful industrialization of developing countries inevitably requires a strong material component. Alternative development priorities are thus urgently needed both for mature and emerging economies: reducing absolute consumption levels for the former, and avoiding the trap of resource-intensive economic and human development for the latter.

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“…We take "the global use of materials since the beginning of the 20th century" according to the publicly available dataset [65,66]. This provides the evolution of global resource extraction for the 99 years between 1900 and 1998.…”

Section: Global Resources: Informing Division Of Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

The More You Know, the More You Can Grow: An Information Theoretic Approach to Growth in the Information Age

Hilbert

2017

Entropy

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In our information age, information alone has become a driver of social growth. Information is the fuel of "big data" companies, and the decision-making compass of policy makers. Can we quantify how much information leads to how much social growth potential? Information theory is used to show that information (in bits) is effectively a quantifiable ingredient of growth. The article presents a single equation that allows both to describe hands-off natural selection of evolving populations and to optimize population fitness in uncertain environments through intervention. The setup analyzes the communication channel between the growing population and its uncertain environment. The role of information in population growth can be thought of as the optimization of information flow over this (more or less) noisy channel. Optimized growth implies that the population absorbs all communicated environmental structure during evolutionary updating (measured by their mutual information). This is achieved by endogenously adjusting the population structure to the exogenous environmental pattern (through bet-hedging/portfolio management). The setup can be applied to decompose the growth of any discrete population in stationary, stochastic environments (economic, cultural, or biological). Two empirical examples from the information economy reveal inherent trade-offs among the involved information quantities during growth optimization.

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The Physical Economy of the United States of America

Cited by 143 publications

References 34 publications

The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long‐Term Material Flow Analysis (1860–2010)

The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long‐Term Material Flow Analysis (1860–2010)

Development and Dematerialization: An International Study

The More You Know, the More You Can Grow: An Information Theoretic Approach to Growth in the Information Age

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