The Non-Market Benefits of Nature: What Should Be Counted in Green GDP?

James W. Boyd ()

Discussion Papers from Resources For the Future

Abstract: Green gross domestic product (green GDP) is meant to account for nature’s value on an equal footing with the market economy. Several problems bedevil green GDP, however. One is that nature does not come prepackaged in units like cars, houses, and bread. Even worse, green GDP requires measurement of the benefits arising from public goods provided by nature for which there are no market indicators of value. So what should green GDP count? That is the subject of this paper. Ecological and economic theory are used to describe what should be counted—and what should not—if green GDP is to account for the nonmarket benefits of nature.

Keywords: green GDP; environmental accounting; ecosystem services; index theory; nonmarket valuation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q51 Q57 Q58 D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-pke
Date: 2006-05-03
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-06-24.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-06-24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Resources For the Future
Series data maintained by Webmaster ().