Research rationale for the economic objective, ARGOS

Abstract

The primary interest of an economist is the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy infinite“wants”, and several theories on how this can be done has been developed. The mostprominent and well known of these theories are Marxism and the neo-classical approach.The dominating theme in the post war economics has been financial growth and until the1960’s, environmental concerns were of secondary importance. From then and onwards, agrowing awareness of the social and environmental costs of financial growth has fuelled anongoing debate and contributed to approaches in economics that explicitly recognises socialand environmental aspects of the economic context.Also these “new” theories differ in the way they propose society should go about allocatingour scarce resources to different uses. However, in our opinion, they share a commonobjective, i.e. to maximize societies welfare, with welfare very broadly defined, definitelyincluding such things as clean air and nice views as well as financial aspects.