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

by Kate Raworth

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. And not just by a little bit: the US, the UK, New Zealand and Australia all saw their footprints grow by more than 30% over that period; in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands they grew by over 50%. Japan’s footprint, meanwhile, grew by 14% and Germany’s by 9%: impressively lower than the rest, but still growing.7 Far from the promised rise and fall of the Environmental Kuznets’ Curve, these data point to a disturbing rise and rise.