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PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to report on a novel approach to assessing long‐term policy and technology impacts. This approach combines a qualitative forecast with a tri‐level quantitative projection to provide a broadly socio‐economic analysis. It is aimed at forecasting problems, such as impact assessment for future policy formulation in the light of socio‐economic, technological and market developments.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a variety of research methods including scenario planning, and techniques taken from analysis of stochastic processes to identify and correlate behaviour, combined with the concepts meso‐economics, in order to produce more robust tri‐level quantitative estimations, driven by qualitative analysis.FindingsThe paper finds that it is possible to join micro‐economic behaviour to macro‐economic, using meso‐economics to attack what was previously seen as a difficult gap between the two. It also finds that quantitative forecasting, based on socio‐economic behaviour using the qualitative assessment from a scenario – i.e. from stories about the future – can form a basis for quantitative forecasting. Different scenarios may be linked to corresponding quantitative economic estimations using key indicator parameters at each economic level, those which are the most relevant to the scenarios, and so exploit statistical techniques across the three levels in a balanced fashion.Originality/valueThis paper summarises a novel approach, taking a fresh look at forecasting economic impacts assessments by shaping the quantitative form with a qualitative tool, while introducing the linking powers of meso‐economics. General economic theories in widespread use today seem to be weak when dealing with the non‐deterministic nature of real markets and economies and especially in linking micro‐economic parameters to macro‐economic. The approach attempts to resolve this dilemma. An example is presented of its use in a recent study.

PurposeThe paper aims to examine the contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to climate change, the origins of ICT unsustainability and explores some possible remedies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on a variety of sources to survey the many problems of sustainable ICTs; their energy consumption trends; planned obsolescence; hazardous materials and hazardous disposal; and analyses the way forward.FindingsHighlights the unsustainability of many ICT trends, e.g. power consumption in data centers, and the extent to which ICT affects progress towards an economy's environmental sustainability.Originality/valueThis paper provides a novel approach to ICT sustainability, highlighting unsustainability of current software technology and related hardware trends, especially the threat of operating systems to planetary sustainability, as well as the growing power consumption trends in data centers.

Overall, public and private interactive networks could be a more powerful force for change than the computer, the railway, or the small electric motor, forming a "teleeconomy", under a set of rules that form "electronic capitalism". In this second of two articles (for the first see foresight, Vol 2, No 1, February 2000) consequences of the emerging economic behaviours laid out in the first article are examined. First, the new rules are explored in detail. They describe the dynamo of electronic trading and the characteristics of a specific form of capitalism. The article then considers impacts of the tele‐economy on sectoral balances, economic power and wealth distribution. Lastly, the new players – the electronic tiger – and the safeguards required are examined. The hub of the dynamo will be in the developing economies where some four billion new global consumers await economic enfranchisement via personal investment, as well as access to new consumer markets and electronic work channels.

Are we now entering the era of a new type of economy, with new rules? What we perceive is more than just an addition to today's economics. By removing the effects of distance, and giving more equal access across nations and classes, networks will effectively reengineer our basic economic equations. Electronic networks can provide access to skills, work and commerce at much lower cost, via electronic markets in jobs, products, services and education. At the same time, they introduce new economic behaviour, as a large enough quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Electronics and optics enable the networking of human capital, expanding its application and accelerating its enrichment via education. So knowledge‐based operations may slowly replace traditional capital‐based assets. Consequently, the conventional process for the creation of wealth with its prerequisites for capital investment is revised:economic value in traditional fixed assets is replaced by "electronic assets". At the same time, the network effect pushes the market mechanism to its limits, through a step‐change in breadth of access, reduced costs of entry and pace of trading. National differences and national markets, all the trappings and devices of commercial locality, are challenged. In this first of two articles, the initial conditions and the evidence for change are examined and the emergence of a new form of economy, or "tele‐economy", is reviewed. Following from this, a view of the form of capitalism driving the economic environment – "electronic capitalism" – is put forward. The second article, to be published in a forthcoming issue of foresight, examines the consequences and conclusions on assets, wealth accumulation, national players and the benefits and dangers of a tele‐economy.