Towards an Environmental Macroeconomics

Abstract

Other than some incipient efforts at including environmental costs in national accounts there are no points of contact between traditional macroeconomics and the environment. This condition is explained in terms of Schumpeter's notion of pre-analytic visions: The economy as isolated flow of exchange value versus the economy as open subsystem of the finite ecosystem. From the second pre-analytic vision the first analytical questions that occur are: how big is the economic subsystem relative to the total ecosystem, and how big should it be? This is the macroeconomic question of optimal scale and needs to be clearly distinguished from the microeconomic question of optimal allocation.