Sustainable Money Research Group was founded in 2011. The members pursue the objective to analyze the following questions:

• Is money as neutral as considered in most economics models? Is the structure of the financial system responsible for driving economic growth?
• Does our economic system require economic growth to guarantee its own stability?
• Does this analysis identify political room to maneuver to overcome the growth paradigm, that were yet overlooked?

The scientific debate about sustainability is still controversial regarding the existence of so called “growth imperatives”. While many authors argue that the fixation on growth is mainly a question of mentality, others suspect that a structural growth imperative exist. They describe its causes with different approaches, disputed for their plausibility. Our goal is to provide a complete and detailed overview of the current state of research, and to categorize and to evaluate the explanations. We further study whether monetary innovations can play a role in mitigating a growth imperative, fostering ecological sustainability and social stability.

• Oliver Richters, Andreas Siemoneit: Fear of stagnation? A review on growth imperatives. VÖÖ Discussion Paper 6, March 2017.
• Oliver Richters, Andreas Siemoneit: How imperative are the Joneses? Economic Growth between Desire and Social Coercion, VÖÖ Discussion Paper 4, January 2017 (Download PDF).
• Oliver Richters, Andreas Siemoneit: Consistency and Stability Analysis of Models of a Monetary Growth Imperative, Ecological Economics 126, June 2017, pp. 114–125. Preprint as VÖÖ Discussion Paper 1, February 2016.
• Martin Sauber, Benedikt Weihmayr: Full Reserve Banking: solving the problem of public debt and the positive interest-rate-growth-differential through debt-free money? ESEE conference 2015, Leeds.
• Matthew Berg, Brian Hartley, Oliver Richters: A Stock-Flow Consistent Input-Output Model with Applications to Energy Price Shocks, Interest Rates, and Heat Emissions, New Journal of Physics 17 015011, 2015.
• Christian Kimmich, Ferdinand Wenzlaff: Structure and Agency in the Dynamics of Growth – A monetary macroeconomic equilibrium perspective on growth imperatives and stagnation. ESEE conference ‘Ecological Economics and Institutional Dynamics’, Lille, 2013.
• Josh Ryan-Collins, Ludwig Schuster, Tony Greenham: Energising Money – An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. new economics foundation, 2013.
• Christian Kimmich, Ferdinand Wenzlaff: Exploring preconditions for a stationary economy: The role of the golden rule and the central bank dilemma, FMM conference ‘The State of Economics after the Crisis’, Berlin, 2012.

Further publications are available in German.