ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop an explanation for why economists have been formulating the question of sustainability so incompletely. It explores how the relationships between sustainability and intergenerational transfers affect the discount rate and resource valuation, and investigates the significance of intergenerational transfers reformulation to the role of benefit-cost analysis in policy formulation. The widespread concern that the sustainability of development must be ensured marks the demise of our faith that technical and social progress unfolds naturally after the removal of the barriers erected by traditional cultures. Within solely an efficiency framework, which implicitly assumes that the generation holds all of the environmental rights, economists have explored two approaches that would favor sustainability. Less-critical cases of changes in rights are probably the majority, and the assignment of rights and their economic implications need to be considered together. Neoclassical economists espouse the use of the market mechanism because it systematically links complex phenomena.
