Is the Environment a Luxury?

The poor and the wealthy seem to assign different degrees of priority to environmental protection: the proposed construction of a set of new buildings on the Sardinian coast is likely to produce cries from middle and upper income inhabitants and yet be welcomed as a source of new jobs by residents whose earnings are low. This would suggest that income plays a significant role in the setting of environmental policies. The purpose of this volume is to shed light on the relationship between environmental quality and income. Both micro and macroeconomic factors are considered and the chapters are divided into two along these lines. At the heart of the debate is the uneasy relationship between environmental sustainability on the one hand and economic growth on the other. Economists of different persuasions and presenting differing schools of thought assess issues such as environmental quality, the Environmental Kuznets Curve and distributional issues.