Fairness and sustainable development in an unequal world

Despite the global nature of many ecological problems, so far little has been done to realise an international environmental in-tervention. The ecological policies of most industrialised countries have been mainly addressed to guarantee an environmentally sus-tainable future to their own direct descendants rather than to the earth as a whole. This consideration raises the following issue: can this “partial ” intergenerational altruism achieve sustainable development? Taking the notion of fairness as criterion of sus-tainable development, the paper examines the effects of partial intergenerational altruism in a simple two-region (North-South) non cooperative Nash Equilibrium model