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Green Accounting

Developing "greener" national accounts holds the promise of placing environmental problems into a framework that key economic ministries in any government will understand. For too long now, ministries of finance and planning have paid scant attention to the exploitation of the natural resource base, or the damaging effects of environmental pollution. At the same time, countries have been developing national environmental action plans that read as if they were written by the environment ministry with no links to the economics ministries. Publications regarding Green Accounting can be found below.

The prominent indicators linking the macro-economy and the environment are measures of:
  • adjusted net saving (formerly called genuine saving) -- Building on the same concept as the NNP, adjusted net saving measure the true rate of savings in an economy after taking into account depletion of natural resources and damage caused by pollution. Adjusted net saving is the true saving rate in a country after accounting for investments in human capital, depreciation of produced assets, and the depletion and degradation of the environment. More information can be found via the link on the left hand side.
  • wealth accounting -- Another type of green accounting, this is the Bank's analysis of estimates of the wealth of nations, exploring the composition of wealth at a point in time (largely for the year 1994). More information can be found via the link on the left hand side.

Capital Accumulation and Resource Depletion : A Hartwick Rule Counterfactual
Green National Accounts: Policy Uses and Empirical Experience, 1996
Policy Applications of Environmental Accounting, 2003 (371KB PDF)
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