| Abstract: |
Sustainable consumption is at the center of sustainable development that every
country seems to want. One of the great challenges of this century must be to
understand what drives the consumption and how we can reduce consumption
through increased efficiency. However consumption is not simply determined by
population growth, which is commonly assumed to be a key cause of
unsustainable consumption, but also by economic activity, technology choices,
social values, institutions and policies. In this paper, we focus our analysis
on lignite consumption in Turkey as an exhaustible natural resource and we
assume that the consumption is only the ultimate end of the economic activity.
Some improvments of the Weitzman model (1976) are proposed by introducing an
environmental preference parameter into the model to complement his
interpretation of welfare. Our aim is to pass from theory to practical
applications by presenting some modest empirical results. Our model is
constructed under GAMS for the period 1980-2080 using Turkish data and leads
to the interesting result that an environmental taxation policy can lead to a
social welfare increase in Turkey. |