Page 102 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.70, # 2, 2013, pp. 99-112

affect on environment, while developing countries were more concentrated on improving the

living conditions. So, in the concept of sustainable development developed countries paid more
attention to word sustainable and developing countries to word development. The Brundtland

Commission also offered the popluar definition of sustainable development as „development that
meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet

their own needs“. Acting on the Brundtland report, summits such as the Earth Summit in Rio,
Brazil (United Nations, 1992), were the major international meetings to bring sustainable

development to the mainstream. Its action Plan, Agenda 21, considered integrated environmental

and economic accounting as a „first step towards the integration of sustainability into economic
management“. Ten years later, the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development (United

Nations, 2002) reaffirmed the commitment to the Rio principles and Agenda 21. It did not take

up environmental accounting, but called on governments to promote data collection and
indicators for sustainable development. Rio 2012, Rio+20 (United Nations, 2012) the third

international conference on sustainable development aimed at reconciling the economic and
environmental goals of the global community. Nations agreed “to explore alternatives to Gross

Domestic Product as a measure of wealth that take environmental and social factors into account
in an effort to assess and pay for ‘environmental services’ provided by nature, such as carbon

sequestration and habitat protection.” It was also recognized that "fundamental changes in the

way societies consume and produce are indispensable for achieving global sustainable
development.”

The three approaches of sustainable development cover the following:

The economic concept of sustainability involves requirements for sufficient and stable
economic growth, such as financial stability, low and stable inflation rates, capacity to invest, fair

distribution of natural resources among the regions and in time between the current and future
generations, and requires to reconcile economic activity with productivity of ecosystems, and

based on the removable capital theory developed by R. M. Solow (1974,1986). This approach is
prevalent in literature, analyzing sustainable use of renewable natural resources, because it is the

main theory of optimal and economic effectiveness, fitted to the usage of limited resources.

Bearing the environmental concept of sustainable development, the major attention is
being paid to the stability of biological and physical systems. Here the most important goal

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