Counting the Environment: The Environmental Implications of International Accounting Standards

Jason Thistlethwaite
Additional contact information
Jason Thistlethwaite: Jason Thistlethwaite is a PhD candidate in Global Governance at the University of Waterloo, a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow and Balsillie Fellow. He completed his master's degree in political science at the University of Western Ontario. His research is focused on explaining the politics and strategy behind the banking, insurance and accounting sectors' responses to climate change. He also researches international financial regulatory reform and global climate change politics.

Global Environmental Politics, 2011, vol. 11, issue 2, 75-97

Abstract: Although rarely studied, international accounting standards shape what information regarding a firm's environmental performance is communicated to international financial markets. This article builds on scholarship describing the influence of international accounting standards on private financial markets to show that nominally technical choices regarding how to recognize and measure firms' environmental impacts hold the potential to reduce these impacts. Obscure accounting debates within the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) mask important political choices about what a firm must disclose to investors about its environmental liabilities and risks. IASB decisions about how these appear on corporate balance sheets change the link between a firm's environmental performance and its economic value and, thereby, contribute to steering private financial markets toward rewarding sustainable behavior within the global economy. This analysis demonstrates the authority of the IASB as an overlooked source of global environmental governance. (c)© 2011 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/GLEP_a_00056 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:11:y:2011:i:2:p:75-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().