ABSTRACT
Efficiency has been the hallmark of environmental economics. Indeed, a large number of economists became concerned with the environment only when they realized that it led competitive markets to allocate goods and services in ways that were not consistent with Pareto optimality On the other hand, the search for the most cost-effective forms of state interventions to correct such failures was itself largely conditioned by the efficiency requirement, in order to make the costs of the required corrections as low as possible. Efficiency is unquestionably of utmost importance. However, the very limited attention paid to distributional issues is not to be reckoned in positive terms. One of its implications is that not much progress has been made in the attempt to connect social and environmental sustainability as advocated as early as 1987 by the well-known Bruntland’s report. This is not to say that distributional issues have been totally ignored by environmental economists. But contributions to this field of studies have, until recently, been few and rather limited in scope.
