This book highlights methodological approaches for the economics of
sustainable development and brings together recent empirical work done
in India, especially by Dr. Surender Kumar and Dr. Shunsuke Managi.
Various chapters in this book use Indian data to show the very wide
applicability of methodologies in the theory of production for dealing
with many empirical issues of environmentally sustainable development in
a developing country. I congratulate the authors for the time and effort
devoted to compiling this very useful reference on the subject and the
publishers for publishing this volume. The methodologies of cost
functions, distance functions, and production fu- tions have been used
in many recent studies and in the studies reported in this book for
environmental valuation. Environmental valuation is required for
designing policy instruments like pollution taxes for sustainable
development and for meas- ing green GDP. The UN methodology of
integrated environmental and economic accounting provides ways of
measuring the cost of maintaining environmental resources at sustainable
levels or the maintenance cost for estimating green GDP. Some of the
chapters in this book show that the methodology of distance functions
could be used for estimating the cost of environmentally sustainable
development.