Green accounting: from theory to practice

Jeffrey R. Vincent

Environment and Development Economics, 2000, vol. 5, issue 01, pages 13-24

Abstract: A decade has passed since Wasting Assets, a study of Indonesia by RobertRepetto and colleagues at the World Resources Institute, drew widespreadattention to the potential divergence between gross and net measures ofnational income. This was by no means the first green accounting study.Martin Weitzman, John Hartwick, and Partha Dasgupta and GeoffreyHeal had all conducted seminal theoretical work in the 1970s. But theWorld Resources Institute study demonstrated that data were adequateeven in a developing country to estimate adjustments for the depletion ofsome important forms of natural capital and that the adjustments couldbe large relative to conventional, gross measures of national product andinvestment. The adjusted, net measures suggested that a substantialportion of Indonesia s rapid economic growth during the 1970s and1980s was simply the unsustainable cashing in of the country s naturalwealth.

Date: 2000
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