Sustainable growth

This paper explores the view that a criterion of intergenerational equity serves to make choices according to ethical intuitions on a domain of relevant technological environments. In line with this view I first calibrate different criteria of intergenerational equity in the AK model of economic growth, with a given productivity parameter A, and then evaluate their performance by mapping the consequences of the criteria in various technological environments. The evaluation is based on the extent to which they yield social choice mappings satisfying four desirable properties. The Calvo criterion as well as sustainable discounted utilitarianism and rank-discounted utilitarianism yield sustainable growth in the AK model, the Ramsey technology and the Dasgupta–Heal–Solow–Stiglitz technology for any specifications of these technological environments. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00355-016-0977-