Evaluation of Sustainable Economic Growth in Portuguese Agriculture and Other Sectors - The Agricultural Economics of the 21st Century - page 89

Chapter 7
Evaluation of Sustainable Economic Growth
in Portuguese Agriculture and Other Sectors

V ´ tor Jo ˜ o Pereira Domingues Martinho

1 Introduction

The tradeoff between economic growth and sustainability will be the big challenge
in the future, considering the levels of economic growth needed and the increasing
signs of sustainability problems, in different contexts (environmental, social, etc.)
verified in many regions of the world.
In this way, all the good research studies in these subjects are well intended to
shine some light on these problematic questions and to try and find some solutions
for the conciliation between the earth's limits and human presence.
This study intends to be innovative in these fields, because it utilizes a Keynesian
model based on the second law of Kaldor ( 1966 , 1967 ) extended with new variables
to capture the different levels of sustainability. There was no evidence found in
theoretical literature for any study about the relationship between sustainability and
economic growth using the relationship involving productivity growth as a function
of the output growth (second law of Kaldor). In another way, performing this
analysis for Portugal can be seen as another pertinent contribution, as there are
very few studies concerning these aspects for Portuguese regions.
Indeed, Portugal has improved its performance, in a sustainable way, in many
social, demographic, and educational indicators over recent years. This is proved by
the data used, in this study, for the variables relating to population density, life
expectancy, number of doctors in medicine, human resources in science and
technology, and the infant mortality rate. The question here is to try to analyze if
the evolution of these indicators is compatible with economic growth, from a
sustainable perspective.
Nowadays, this is an important topic to discuss, what with the current debate in
Portugal about sustainability and the pertinence, in terms of economic growth and