Natural resources in the production process: aggregate scarcity and constraints in the context of sustainable development ; Περιβαλλοντικά βιώσιμη οικονομική ανάπτυξη και η συνεισφορά των φυσικών πόρων στην παραγωγή και στην ανάπτυξη: το ζήτημα της σπανιότητας των φυσικών πόρων και οι επιπτώσεις του στις δυνατότητες για μια βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη

The last few decades have seen the construction of detailed and accurate databases that account the natural resources flows enter into the economic system. These updated datasets and resources accounting frameworks, such as the widely used Material Flow Analysis (MFA), provide nowadays the opportunity for an empirical validation of the early theoretical contributions to the investigation of the natural resources-economy link. Essentially, the underling optimism of the contemporary literature that investigates the so-called Decoupling effect could be seen, to some extent, as the empirical revival of the historical debate between Solow and Georgescu-Roegen, concerning the impact of the scarcity of natural resources on economic growth. The contemporary literature on decoupling asserts that there is a gradual de-link between the consumption of resources and economic growth, supporting to some extent the “technology optimists” of the weak sustainability school of thought. Evidently, this conclusion is empirically confirmed for the vast majority of developed, as well as for many developing, economies. However, despite the estimated decoupling trends in most cases examined, there is another inconvenient empirical estimate which essentially questions the decoupling potentials: the social/industrial metabolism, namely the per capita resources consumption, is dramatically increasing for the vast majority of the examined (developed and developing) economies (with Japan, the UK, and Germany being some notable exceptions). Furthermore, these increasing per capita consumption trends are based more and more on nonrenewable resources. Based on this contradiction between the estimated decoupling and per capita consumption trends, the present dissertation aspires to question the decoupling potentials of the economic process. To this end, the thesis adopts the Material Flow Analysis (MFA) methodological framework and the most up-to-date datasets on resources flows, in order to establish and evaluate a new decoupling evaluation ...