Erschienen:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2016
Erschienen in:NBER working paper series ; no. w22060
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.3386/w22060
Identifikator:
Reproduktionsnotiz:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Mode of access: World Wide Web
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
Beschreibung:
In theory, and under some quite strong assumptions, there exists an important rigorous quantitative relationship among the following four fundamental economic concepts: (1) "wealth"; (2) "income"; (3) "sustainability"; (4) "accounting". These four basic concepts are placed in quotation marks here because a necessary first step will be to carefully and rigorously define what exactly is meant by each concept. In this paper, I review what is known about this important four-fold quantitative relationship in an ultra-simplified setting. I identify some basic applications of this simplified economic theory of wealth and income (and sustainability and accounting). While the contents of this paper are expressed at a very high level of abstraction and require some restrictive assumptions, I believe that the fundamental four-fold relationship it sharply highlights is useful for understanding, at least in principle, what is "wealth" and what is its theoretical relationship to "income," "sustainability," and "accounting."