Journal of European Public Policy 6:3 September 1999: 359Ð75 Journal of European Public Policy ISSN 1350-1763 print/ISSN 1466-4429 online © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd Competitive and sustainable growth: logic and inconsistency Erik Jones 1 ABSTRACT The European Union is pursuing a competitive and sustainable develop- ment model that combines insights from environmental as well as economic analysis. The rhetoric of this model is attractive: European development should be ‘sustainable’ both in terms of its use of labour and environmental resources, and in terms of the location of economic activity. European policy, therefore, should encourage industries to use more labour and fewer resources, as well as to create jobs at the local level in order to internalize market externalities. Despite the appeal of such rhetoric, the implementation of this new development model poses both analytical and distributional concerns: the assumptions of environmental and economic analysis come into theoretical contradiction and the economic effects of the policy are socially undesirable. The solution is to abandon the competitive and sustainable development model, and to pursue competitive growth and sustainable resource use as separate policy objectives. KEY WORDS Development; environment; growth; social model; unemployment; wages. The European Union’s (EU’s) new Fifth Framework Programme allocates almost £3 billion ‘[t]o support research activities contributing to competitiveness and sustainability, particularly where these two objectives interact’. 2 Many of these activities relate to the development of new materials and the promotion of environ- mentally friendly practices. However, the broader intellectual roots of the project lie in the belief that economic and environmental policies can and should be inte- grated. This belief was recently incorporated into the foundational documents of the EU. At the June 1997 Amsterdam summit, 3 representatives of the member states amended the objectives of the EU to include ‘a high level of employment’ and to emphasize the importance of a ‘balanced and sustainable development’. 4 They made a similar change to the ‘Treaty Establishing the European Community’. In that document, the commitment to ‘a high level of employment’ already existed and yet member state representatives added ‘sustainable’ to ‘development’ and introduced ‘competitiveness’ as an objective in its own right. 5 The purpose of this article is to examine Europe’s broad strategy to achieve ‘com- petitive and sustainable growth’ and to map its implications. The argument is that the integration of economic and environmental policies is rhetorically persuasive but analytically flawed. Worse, attempts to pursue ‘competitive and sustainable