Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment

Partha Dasgupta

Nov 2001 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The result is a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics. With the publication of this new paperback edition, Professor Dasgupta has taken the opportunity to update and revise his text in a number of ways, including developments to facilitate its current use on a number of gradate courses in environmental and resource economics. The treatment of the welfare economics of imperfect economies has been developed using new findings, and the Appendix has been expanded to include applications of the theory to a number of institutions, and to develop approximate formulae for estimating the value of environmental natural resources.

About the author

Partha Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. A Past President of the Royal Economic Society and of the European Economic Association, Professor Dasgupta is a Fellow of the British Academy, Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. His publications include An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).