ISSN:
1573-2991
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Biology
,
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
Notes:
Summary Although structural change in many industrialised countries has increased since the early 1970s, the environmental policy aspects of this change have hardly been investigated. The more pronounced the positive environmental effects of structural change become, the more positive will be the structure-oriented options of environmental policy. Using a set of four indicators, 31 Eastern and Western industrialised countries were tested with regard to economic structure and environmentally significant structural change. The authors come to the conclusion that the strong correlation between economic performance and environmental pollution, unequivocal in 1970, had become much weaker in the 1980s. The delinking of economic growth from material-intensive industrial production processes is particularly evident. In some cases automatic environmental benefits (“environmental gratis effects”) were generated in this way. However, the development profiles of the countries investigated differ greatly. There are countries, in particular Sweden, withabsolute structural improvement in the ecological sense; countries like Japan and Norway with structural improvementrelative to economic growth; and countries, including most Eastern and Southern European states, featuring no structural improvement or even environmentally negative structural change.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02240467
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