The full effects of decisions made today about many environmental policies -including climate change and nuclear waste- will not be felt for many years. For issues with long-term ramifications, analysts often employ discount rates to compare present and future costs and benefits. This is reasonable, and discounting has become a procedure that raises few objections. But are the methods appropriate for measuring costs and benefits for decisions that will have impacts 20 to 30 years from now the right ones to employ for a future that lies 200 to 300 years in the future? This landmark book argues that methods reasonable for measuring gains and losses for a generation into the future may not be appropriate when applied to a longer span of time. Paul Portney and John Weyant have assembled some of the world's foremost economists to reconsider the purpose, ethical implications, and application of discounting in light of recent research and current policy concerns. These experts note reasons why conventional calculations involved in discounting are undermined when considering costs and benefits in the distant future, including uncertainty about the values and preferences of future generations, and uncertainties about available technologies. Rather than simply disassemble current methodologies, the contributors examine innovations that will make discounting a more compelling tool for policy choices that influence the distant future. They discuss the combination of a high shout-term with a low long-term diescount rate, explore discounting according to more than one set of anticipated preferences for the future, and outline alternatives involving simultaneous consideration of valuation, discounting and political acceptability.

In policymaking, economists may use discount rates to compare present with future costs and benefits. In this landmark book, a number of the world's foremost economists reconsider the appropriate use of discounting for the future. This work should go a long way toward refining the economic dimensions of public policy, particularly in environmental matters. As with the policies it discusses, the impact of the book should be felt tomorrow as well as today.

This highly accessible book provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of current research and theory about why and how we should protect future generations. It exposes how and why the interests of people today and those of future generations are often in conflict and what can be done. It rebuts critical concepts such as Parfits' non-identity paradox and Beckerman's denial of any possibility of intergenerational justice. The core of the book is the lucid application of a veil of ignorance to derive principles of intergenerational justice which show that our duties to posterity are stronger than is often supposed. Tremmel's approach demands that each generation both consider and improve the well-being of future generations. To measure the well-being of future generations Tremmel employs the Human Development Index rather than the metrics of utilitarian subjective happiness. The book thus answers in detailed, concrete terms the two most important questions of every theory of intergenerational justice: what to sustain? and how much to sustain?

Due to the mortgage crisis of 2008, laws aimed at achieving budgetary and financial stability were enacted. The concept of ?nancial sustainability has been linked to the need of rendering public services without compromising the ability to do so in the future. Financial Sustainability and Intergenerational Equity in Local Governments is a critical scholarly resource that analyzes the financial sustainability of local governments with the aim of ensuring equality and intergenerational equity. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as intergenerational equity, public policies, and sustainability management, this book is geared towards government officials, managers, academicians, practitioners, students, and researchers seeking current research on identifying public policies to ensure financial balance.

Today, the judge, the citizen, the politician, and the entrepreneur are concerned with the sustainability of our development.

The full effects of decisions made today about many environmental policies -including climate change and nuclear waste- will not be felt for many years. For issues with long-term ramifications, analysts often employ discount rates to compare present and future costs and benefits. This is reasonable, and discounting has become a procedure that raises few objections. But are the methods appropriate for measuring costs and benefits for decisions that will have impacts 20 to 30 years from now the right ones to employ for a future that lies 200 to 300 years in the future? This landmark book argues that methods reasonable for measuring gains and losses for a generation into the future may not be appropriate when applied to a longer span of time. Paul Portney and John Weyant have assembled some of the world's foremost economists to reconsider the purpose, ethical implications, and application of discounting in light of recent research and current policy concerns. These experts note reasons why conventional calculations involved in discounting are undermined when considering costs and benefits in the distant future, including uncertainty about the values and preferences of future generations, and uncertainties about available technologies. Rather than simply disassemble current methodologies, the contributors examine innovations that will make discounting a more compelling tool for policy choices that influence the distant future. They discuss the combination of a high shout-term with a low long-term diescount rate, explore discounting according to more than one set of anticipated preferences for the future, and outline alternatives involving simultaneous consideration of valuation, discounting and political acceptability.

As the Kyoto conference of the parties on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change once again underscored, man-made climate change has become one of the major challenges to our generation and many generations to come. Since scientific evidence on climate change can be seen as increasingly reliable, the focus of our attention has to turn more and more to the question of foreseeable damages and to possibilities to prevent and mitigate climate change. In other words, we need to analyse the economic aspects of man marle climate change and the policy options to prevent its most severe impacts. This book reports on the findings of an international workshop on these aspects of global climate change. It was organised by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany on March 6th and 7th 1997. In the light of the ongoing international policy-making process on climate change, we decided to publish the report after the Kyoto conference from December Ist to 10th, 1997, to include the results of the conference, which emphasise the importance of economic aspects and economic policy options when it comes to addressing the problern of man-made climate change. Thus, this book went to press in February 1998 the moment we received the official version of the Kyoto Protocol, which is reproduced in the annex.