Economic theory is not neutral, and the results when it is applied owe much to the implicit and explicit assumptions embedded in a particular theory. That such assumptions reflect specific ideologies is most obvious in the case of the neoclassical economics that underlies neoliberal economic policies.

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.

This paper argues that there are essential features of capitalist modes of production, consumption, and waste dispersal in interaction with the environment and its built-in systemic features that contradict long-term sustainable development. These features include:
(a) contradictions in the origin and meaning of sustainability;
(b) the central role of the productivity ethic in capitalism and its reproduction in emergent green capitalism;
(c) the commodification of nature and the continued promotion of expanding consumption;
(d) globalism and the contradictions of continued Western-style development; and
(e) the emergence of anthropogenic ecocrises and crises interaction.
In light of these barriers to capitalist sustainability, an alternative social narrative is needed, one that embraces values, understandings, and relationships that promote ecological stability and justice.

"Like democracy and globalization, the concept of sustainable development has become one of the most ubiquitous, contested, and indispensable concepts of our time. Although the concept was first introduced in response to environmental concerns, it has been defined primarily by the mainstream tradition of economic analysis, which tends to marginalize the issue of ecological sustainability itself. Recently, however, scholars advancing various critical perspectives challenged the mainstream economic analysis of sustainable development. This essay examines the presuppositions, logic, and major themes of mainstream sustainable development theory, primarily within economics, and explores the critiques of mainstream analysis offered by various poststructuralist cultural theorists and ecological Marxists.
Although considered to be superior in their greater emphasis on ecological sustainability, neither of these critical approaches is deemed adequate in itself. The argument here instead leads to the conception that an adequate approach to sustainable development requires combining insights from various critical approaches and perspectives.

Market forces are powerful ... and they can be powerful for good. But every professional economist, and all but the most ideologically encrusted, recognize that, left unchecked, they can yield socially deleterious outcomes. The economic theory of perfectly competitive markets takes careful account of market failures in the forms of externalities, public goods and the like; and begins, it is important to remember, by entirely abstracting from the equity of income distribution and the distribution of power. Empirical reality also presents us with an imperfection-ridden market system - imperfectly competitive, imperfectly informed, with many markets missing entirely. It also presents us with grotesquely inequitable initial conditions. To many, if not indeed by now the majority, inequities in the distribution of income, wealth and power are both the most important determinants of economic outcomes in market systems and the most important targets for international economic policy.