Wealth Inequality and Planetary Boundaries in a Stylized Agent-Based Model

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Useful for modelers working on inequality-environment linkages.

🏢実務担当者:Provides theoretical background for designing equitable climate policies.

🏛政策担当者:Emphasizes that inequality must be addressed for effective ecological transition.

At the intersection of rising wealth inequality and intensifying environmental pressures, we investigate a reverse causal relationship that has received comparatively little attention: wealth inequality may not only be a consequence of environmental crises, but also act as a structural obstacle to the ecological transition itself. We develop a stylized agent-based model in which heterogeneous agents, whose initial wealth follows a Pareto distribution, allocate their income between either a Brown or a Green sector through a utility function. The function is designed to capture the trade-off between short-term returns and exposure to long-term systemic risks. A central ingredient is that wealthier agents perceive themselves as less vulnerable to environmental shocks, thereby reducing the amount of resources available for the transition. We show that, beyond inequality thresholds compatible with those observed in most developed countries, the economy remains locked in a Brown regime, even when a substantial share of agents is sensitive to externalities. We then assess a set of stylized fiscal policies (basic income, carbon taxation, Green incentives, and a combined scheme) and find that their effectiveness depends strongly on the inequality regime and on the regressivity embedded in the fiscal mechanism, revealing multidimensional trade-offs between transition speed, cumulative environmental destruction, growth, and fiscal pressure.

• arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14331first seen 2026-06-15 04:11:06 · last seen 2026-06-16 04:12:00