Ekonomske ideje i praksa | broj 6 | septembar 2012.
social development became very serious in the second half of the past century, so the governments of all states, United Nations, as well as many institutes and researchers in various science fields were engaged in solving them. The basic problem and also the scientific choice of desirable development was the choice of adequate criteria. This problem existed during second half of the past century, and it is still present today. Ban Ki Moon at the Summit, which was devoted to the sustainable development, in Rio, in June 2012, declared that there is the need to find: “The new index and the indicators set for the measurement of sustainable development”. The idea of development was initially connected to the economic growth i.e. in some sense to GNP or GDP. The development problems based on neoclassical economic theory paradigms were intended to maximize welfare based on constrained consumption. The accepted criteria mentioned in (Batanovic et al. 2012) : human welfare, profit or cost, in the theories of the firm, utility function, in the theory of household, utility function in the theory of optimal economic growth, belong to economic categories. It means that the development problems are based on neoclassical economic theory paradigms (Hands, 2004). It was found, however, during the eighties of the 20th century that adoption of such an approach to the development had many negative consequences. The most important negative effects of such a concept of development are: - Uneven distribution of development utilities (Peyton, 1994), -N egative effects on Nature - environmental and existing social structures (Bookchin, 2005). In addition, the following questions occur: Is the planetary ecosystem capable of satisfying the higher demand for resources? Has its waste absorption capacity been exceeded (Steiner and Nanser, 2008)? These facts proved that optimal criteria should not be reduced only to the economic component but its nature should, in the most general case, be threefold: social, economic and ecological. The UN, having in mind mentioned facts, conducted the program which goal was the creation of the new Human Development Index (HDE), in the late 1970’s (Streeten, 1981). This index uses health, education and ecological measures, besides the GDP, for the evaluation of the success of the development (Hanley, et al. 2007). This view was nicely visually expressed through an illustration using three overlapping subsets, presented like ellipses (Figure1), indicating that the three pillars of sustainability are not mutually exclusive. One ellipse, called SOC, symbolizes sociological criteria, the second one called ECON, symbolizes economic criteria and the third one, called ECOL symbolizes ecological ones. Three ellipses form 7 subsets. The union of SOC, ECON and ECOL defines the SUSTAINABILITY region. The union of ECON and ECOL defines the
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