Human well-being and the natural environment

Table of Contents
Summary and Guide
Introduction: Means and Ends
I Valuing and Evaluating
Prologue
1:The Notion of Well-Being
*1:Ordering Social States
2:Why Measure Well-Being?
3:Constituents and Determinants of Well-Being
II Measuring Current Well-Being
Prologue
4:Theory
5:Current Quality of Life in Poor Countries
III Measuring Well-Being over Time
Prologue
6:Intergenerational Well-Being
*6:Intergenerational Conflicts
7:Economic Institutions and the Natural Environment
8:Valuing Goods
9:Wealth and Well-Being
IV Evaluating Policies in Imperfect Economies
Prologue
10:Policy Reforms
11:Discounting Future Consumption: How and Why
12:Institutional Responses to Policy Change
V Valuing Potential Lives
Prologue
13:Some Views
14:Classical Utilitarianism and the Genesis Problem
*14:Numbers and Well-Being under Classical Utilitarianism
15:Actual versus Potential Lives
*15:Generation-Relative Utilitarianism
Appendix

Description
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.