The Performance Economy - a way towards economic and societal stability?
- When?
- Wednesday 20 February 2013, 13.00 hrs to 14.00 hrs
- Where?
- 45A AZ 04
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students, Alumni
- Speaker:
- Walter R. Stahel, Vice Secretary General & Head of Risk Management Research, The Geneva Association
- Admission price:
- No charge
A number of changes have made the shift from a global linear industrial economy to a regional circular economy (C.E.) increasingly interesting for economic actors in industrialised countries:
• In a situation of saturated markets, a C.E. offers the alternative of managing existing stocks instead of continued ‘replacement’ production. A C.E. provides low-carbon labour-intensive but competitively-priced solutions.
• Resource prices have constantly decreased from 1900 to 2000; maintaining ownership of goods and embodied resources made little resource sense. At the beginning of the 21st century, this trend has changed, and it is expected that resource prices in the 21st century will constantly increase.
• The increase in Germany’s GDP from 2000 to 2007 was EUR 381bn, which is the same figure as the increase in German sovereign debt in the same period. Does this indicate there was zero economic growth from 2000 to 2007?
• Persistent unemployment in many industrialised countries has been above ‘comfort level’, with youth unemployment rates above 50% in many countries. The unemployment situation in emerging economies is often worse.
• The necessity to mitigate climate change by reducing CO2 and GHG emissions has been recognised at the UN Rio Conference in 1992. Yet in 2011, GHG emissions were at an all-time high and growing faster than the world economy.
In addition, voluntary and regulatory agreements are reducing the global competitiveness of companies in the ‘capitalist West’; these agreements are linked to the topics of liability dynamics and litigation funding, which are based on cultural differences and societal objectives.
The Circular Economy and even more so the Performance Economy, retaining the ownership of goods and their embodied resources, contribute to solving many of the problems listed above, offer resource security to companies and nation states, and can be a strategy to increase global competitiveness for European companies. In addition, they will protect economic actors against new regulatory liability trends, which threaten private sector companies located in countries with democratic political structures.
The lecture will shed light on these complex and intertwined issues, and show the key advantages and innovation opportunities which business models of a continued ownership of goods and their embodied resources generate. Also shown will be the potential impact of framework conditions, such as taxation and voluntary agreements.