Environment

Contemporary mainstream economics has widely “poisoned the well” from which people get their ideas about the relationship between economics and ethics.

While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that women are more risk averse than men, this conclusion merits reconsideration.

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis?

Many public debates about climate change now focus on the economic “costs” of taking action.

Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.

The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”

Evidence of climate change is widely accepted by scientists.

Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.

How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?

The Institute joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in hosting its third-annual plenary conference in Berlin from April 12-15, 2012.

This research project analyses the possibility of achieving economic and financial stability, high employment, and good social outcomes, in the presence of clearly defined resource and environmental limits, even if these mean some limits to economic growth.

This research project develops a comprehensive research agenda to formulate proposals that will help make the financial sector sustainable and facilitate a transition to sustainable economic development.

This research project explores the implications for the economics of gender stereotypes that consider self-interested economic behavior and risk-taking to be masculine and care and caution to be feminine.

Our shared concern – 20 years after Rio, yet poor progress towards wellbeing