ABSTRACT
According to the basic rationale of bio-economics, changes in the structure and function of socio-economic systems can be studied using the metaphor of societal metabolism. The metabolism of human society is a concept going back to the mid-19th century (Martinez-Alier, 1987; Fischer-Kowalsky, 1997). It has been applied in the fields of industrial ecology (Ayres and Simonis, 1994; Duchin, 1998) and to conceptualize matter and energy flow analysis (Adriaanse et al, 1997; Fischer-Kowalski, 1998; Matthews et al, 2000).
