ABSTRACT
As technological innovation undoubtedly is the driving causal factor, this chapter explores the relationship between economic growth, presence of natural resources and employment. Economics is the discipline which analyses the efficient use of scarce resources and the social incentives employed to further this aim. According to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, any development threatening the survival of the earth carries the seeds of its own destruction. The sociological requirement of employment, combined with a rising trend in labour productivity, adds up to economic growth. Society should, as long as possible, try to increase the efficiency of its use of the earth's resources, in those which are currently under the threat of over-exploitation, while striving to maintain fairness. The term 'stationary state' has been introduced in the terminology of economics by John Stuart Mill. The statistical evidence of the environmental Kuznets curve has been challenged by Perman and Stern, who suggested the alternative that a clean-up might simply be the result of time.
