This new academic journal will be of interest to many readers of this newsletter. Coming from the recently established Institute of Green Economics, it "attempts to develop a progressive alternative to conventional economics with the aim of achieving a more sustainable and equitable society ... - a solution-based, real-world, problem-solving economics that speaks the language of other different viewpoints", and reconnects economics with the more human and natural and social sciences.

A short review can't do justice to this volume, which contains 17 contributions from 14 contributors including the two editors. Apart from the editors' substantial contributions introducing the journal and discussing the scope and aims and philosophical underpinning of Green Economics, the following are four points about the need to transcend the boundaries of conventional economics that caught my eye.

(1) Victor Anderson's "Turning Economics Inside Out" draws attention to some of the ways, such as climate change, in which the economic system is now affecting environment and natural resources, and some of the ways, such as marriage breakdown, insecurity of employment, labour mobility, stress, and work-life imbalance, in which it is affecting personal, family and social life. It now invades the culture and psychology of consumers and their aesthetic, symbolic, experiential and psychological wants - for example in the marketing of products like food, clothing, and cars, and in the use of marketing tools like the 'pester power' of children.

Uncertainty about the outcomes of rapid technological development - information and communication technologies, biotechnology, nanotechnology - and growing debate about the relevance of ethics to economic behaviour are other 'externalities' of economic activity (as conventionally understood) that are now rebounding to affect the economic system itself.

Those and other key issues of our time arise "in a 'ring' just outside the boundary drawn by conventional economics". In other words, "the boundary drawn around economics by conventional economists is drawn in exactly the wrong place" for helping us to understand and deal with those issues.

(2) Mary Mellor describes "Ecofeminist Political Economy" as providing "an analysis of the current destructive relationship between humanity and non-human nature through an understanding of women's position at the boundaries of economic systems. From this perspective women, or rather women's work and lives, like the natural world, are externalised and exploited by the valued economy...that values human activities in money or prestige terms".

She describes "the increasingly recognised insight that the money system has its own independent dynamic" as "central to an analysis of money issue and circulation as a possible transformative space for a feminist and green economics". She emphasises that what is important is that money has come to dominate modern economic systems with patterns of exclusion - a question not just of gender equality and environmental damage, but of right to livelihood and economic democracy.

The money-valued economy is parasitical on important aspects of human and natural existence, and its failure to acknowledge them as its true resource base means that they are exploited and damaged.

(3) Chit Chong puts forward "Restoring the Rights of Future Generations" as one of the ethical principles on which politics, economics and justice in the 21st century should be based. We, who live today, are stealing and destroying resources which rightly belong to people of future generations. The concept of Sustainable Development is not enough. Restorative Development is needed.

This is clearly far outside the boundaries within which conventional economics can offer responsible guidance. Conventional economics teaches the principle of 'discounted cash flow' - that getting money now is worth more than getting the same amount of money in the future, and that therefore it is economic to convert real resources into money as fast as possible.

The discounted cash flow principle will have to be turned upside down, to favour investment that benefits future generations. But, as Chit Chong rightly concludes, we will have to look beyond the dogmas of conventional economics for this, to legal and political and educational competence.

(4) Derek Wall's largely favourable review of Amartya Sen's "Development as Freedom", describes it as a progressive, radical version of market-based economics. Sen is, of course, widely respected for his concern with poverty, capacity-building and related aspects of development, and is regarded as an exceptionally enlightened Nobel-prize-winning economist.

But Wall also points out that "what Sen ignores is as important as what he includes. He sees markets as natural and universal, implying that the economic alternative to markets is heavy-handed state oppression. The notion that markets are just one economic mechanism among many lies outside his thought. The ecological effects of markets that tend to lead to ever-increasing production and consumption is also absent".

So is awareness that "the 'free' market often requires violent processes of enclosure" to steal communally managed resources and turn them into private property.

Conclusion: for all his merits, Sen appears to remain a prisoner of the limited discourse and concepts of conventional economics.

Review by James Robertson in his newsletter.May 2006