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2110 Environmental Science Predictions
How can environmentally sustainable societies grow economically?
Concept 1-2 Societies can become more environmentally sustainable through economic development dedicated to improving the quality of life for everyone without degrading the earth’s life-support systems.
There Is a Wide Economic Gap between Rich and Poor Countries Economic growth is an increase in a nation’s output of goods and services. It is usually measured by the percentage of change in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP): the annual market value of all goods and services produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and domestic, operating within a country.
Changes in a country’s economic growth per person are measured by per capita GDP: the GDP divided by the total population at midyear.
The value of any country’s currency changes when it is used in other countries. Because of such differences, a basic unit of currency in one country can buy more of a particular thing than the basic unit of currency of another country can buy. Consumers in the first country are said to have more purchasing power than consumers in the second country have. To help with comparing countries, economists use a tool called purchasing power parity (PPP). By combining per capita GDP and PPP, for any given country, they arrive at a per capita GDP-PPP-a measure of the amount of goods and services that a country’s average citizen could buy in the United States.
While economic growth provides people with more goods and services, economic development has the goal of using economic growth to improve living standards.
The United Nations classifies the world’s countries as economically developed or developing based primarily on their degree of industrialization and their per capita GDP-PPP.
The developed countries (with 1.2 billion people) include the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. Most are highly industrialized and have a high per capita GDP-PPP. All other nations (with 5.5 billion people) are classified as developing countries, most of them in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Some are middle-income, moderately developed countries such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, and Mexico. Others are low-income, least developed countries where per capita GDP-PPP is steadily declining. These 49 countries with 11% of the world’s population include Angola, Congo, Belarus, Nigeria, Nicaragua, and Jordan.
According to the United Nations, such destitute countries are in a desperate cycle of steadily worsening extreme poverty, disease, scarcities of key resources (such as water, cropland, firewood, and fish), dysfunctional government, violence, and social chaos. To survive, many of these counties are cutting down trees, depleting topsoil, and consuming natural resources they need for future survival. This competition for increasingly scarce resources can lead to civil violence, which can further impoverish a country. About 97% of the projected increase in the world’s population between 2007 and 2050 is expected to take place in developing countries, which are least equipped to handle such large population increases.
We live in a world of haves and have-nots. Despite a 40-fold increase in economic growth since 1900, more
Economic Growth and Sustainability
Is exponential economic growth incompatible with environmental sustainability? What are three types of goods whose exponential growth would promote environmental sustainability?
