MODELING SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY: INTEGRATING ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND POPULATION MODELS
For economic and environmental policies aimed at developing sustainable economies, it is important to have a general modeling approach which can quantitatively connect economic processes with biological and physical processes of the environment. If economic processes cannot be measured as to their real physical/biological impacts, one does not know whether or not such economic processes are sustainable in nature. To create an integrated economic/environmental model, we have mathematically generalized the Leontief's input–output economic model — from vector notation to tensor notation. The use of tensor mathematics for input–output models of both an economy and its environment provides a data architecture to create simulation models of the environmental impact of an economy.