Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth

The extraction and processing of Earth’s materials within the borders of high-income countries has indeed been falling, leading to triumphant claims across the EU and the OECD of rising resource productivity and the decoupling of GDP growth from resource use—both touted as early evidence of the ‘green growth’ dream. But the celebrations have come too soon. ‘These trends make developed countries look more resource-efficient,’ warns Tommy Wiedmann, one of the experts spearheading the analysis of international resource flows, ‘but they actually remain deeply anchored to a material foundation underneath.’6 Recently compiled international data reveal that when a nation’s global material footprint is taken into account—by adding up all of the biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and construction minerals used worldwide to create the products that the country imports—then the success story seems to evaporate. From 1990 to 2007 as GDP grew in high-income countries, so did their global material footprints.