Empirismo en economía ecológica:una visión desde la teoría de los sistemas complejos

Abstract

Economies are open complex adaptive systems farfrom thermodynamic equilibrium, and neo-classical environmental. economics is not the best way to describe the behaviour of such sys-tems. Standard econometric analysis takes a deterministic and predic-tive approach, which encourages the search for predictive policy tocorrect environmental problems. Rather, it seems that, because of thecharacteristics of economic systems, an ex-post analysis is moreappropriate, which describes the emergence of such systems proper-ties, and which sees policy as a social steering mechanism. With thisbackground, some of the recent empirical work published in the fieldof ecological economics that follows the approach defended here ispresented. Finally, the conclusion is reached that a predictive use ofeconometrics in ecological economics is not possible. However, thatdoes not mean we should not use empirical analysis. On the contrary,this is to be encouraged, but from a structural and ex-post point ofview.