REGULATING CO-EVOLUTION OF THE ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL POPULATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Aleksei Polovyan

Elena Vishnevskaya

New industrialization in the world and formation of new global industrial structure exacerbate the problem of sustainable development as environmentally friendly development of one countries is often reached due to pollution of others. And it eventually creates problems for everyone, the solution of which requires international regulation. To justify the ways of such regulation the mathematical model is constructed. The model describes the interaction of the two economic and ecological populations presented by sets of enterprises and population of the separate territories which differ in the dominating production technologies, patterns of behavior of economic agents and ecological consequences of their activities. Parameterization of the model made on the basis of indicators for the Germany (an example of ecologically clean territory) and Ukraine (an example of ecologically unfavorable territory). The experiments with the model allowed us to estimate the effectiveness of three different ways of regulating their coevolution with the aim of mitigating ecological problems: 1) punishment in the form of higher relative costs of the “dirty” behavior of economic agents in the ecologically unfavorable territories through the strengthening of environmental taxation, 2) rewards in the form of an increase of the relative benefits of the “clean” behavior of economic agents through a transfer to the territory of more efficient technologies for pollution’s treatment, 3) the mixed impact, suggesting some combination of punishments and rewards. The simulation showed that the best results are obtained by the mixed impact when regulation starting with the rewards through the provision of access to new technologies, thus increasing the overall effectiveness of environmental management on a disadvantaged territory, and then gradually strengthening penalties, pushing economic agents to change their behavior patterns and to develop their own innovation system, capable of generating effective technological solutions to environmental problems.