DRAFT ISEE Position on Economic Growth – 1 March 2007
Originating from a Proposal at the Eighth Biennial Conference, Montreal,
Canada, July 11-14, 2004
Edited Pursuant to Comments Received Following the Ninth Biennial Conference,
Delhi, India, December 15-18, 2006
Background:
1) Economic growth, as defined in standard economics textbooks, is an increase in the
production and consumption of goods and services.
2) Economic growth is often and generally indicated by increasing real gross domestic
product (GDP) or real gross national product (GNP).
3) Economic growth, as conventionally defined above, equates to the physical
expansion of economic output.
4) The growth of an economy will result in increasing human welfare only when the
benefits (such as increased consumption of goods and services) exceed the costs (such
as ecosystem degradation and loss).
5) When the additional benefits of a growing economy are exceeded by the additional
costs, a nation experiences “uneconomic growth,” which is undesirable.
6) An economy grows as an integrated whole consisting of agricultural, extractive,
manufacturing, and services sectors that require physical inputs and produce wastes.
7) Based upon established principles of physics and ecology, there is an eventual limit
to the growth of an economy
8) An economy may temporarily grow beyond its long-term sustainable level through
the use of non-renewable natural resources (for example, fossil fuels) and through the
unsustainably rapid use of renewable natural resources (for example, fisheries).
9) The best available scientific evidence indicates that the global economy and many
national economies have grown beyond their long-term sustainable levels, and that these
economies will recede in the future as a result of resource shortages and deteriorating
environmental conditions.
10) Historically, substitutes for certain natural resources have been found or developed,
but growth of the economy and its associate