¹ This is a report of the Second Askö Meeting, held 31 August to 2 September 1994, in the archipelago outside Stockholm, Sweden. The meeting was organized by the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Box 50005, S-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden. The aim of the meeting was to establish a substantive dialogue among a small group of ecologists and economists to gauge whether an interdisciplinary consensus exists on the issues of economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment and to determine what could be said about the joint development of economic and environmental policy.

² Phenomena for which the relation holds most clearly include poor sanitation, impure water supplies, suspended particulates, SO₂, No_x, and CO (3) [Grossman, G.M. and Krueger, A.B., in The U.S. Mexico Free Trade Agreement, Garber, P., Ed. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 165–177Google Scholar].

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⁸ A related issue is the measurement of economic growth at the macro level. The conventional measure, GNP, is far from adequate as a measure of true economic performance. We need a more comprehensive index that includes the flow of environmental services as well as the value of net changes in the stocks of natural capital so that the true social costs of growth can be internalized. With this improved index, many of the apparent conflicts between ‘growth’ and the environment would disappear because environmental degradation would be subtracted from the index. [See, for example, Dasgupta, P. and Mäler, K.-G., The Environment and Emerging Development Issues, Proceedings of the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, 1990 (Supplement to the World Bank Economic Review, 1991).]Google Scholar

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¹³ We thank the two anonymous referees for helpful comments.