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Environment & Sustainable Development
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Construction of Green National Accounts
Sponsor: AVINA Foundation
Countries: Latin America
Objective
Official national accounts are misrepresenting economic performance by failing to account for resource depletion and environmental degradation. This problem is particularly serious in countries that are heavily dependent on natural resource extraction and countries that suffer from high levels of urban and industrial pollution. By overstating the contribution of extractive resource sectors and heavily polluting industries, official national accounts tend to result in policy choices and investments that perpetuate resource dependence and delay the transition to a diversified economic base and productivity-driven economic growth. The CID Environment and Sustainable Development Program took on the task of developing adjusted or "green" national accounts as indicators of genuine savings, economic performance and sustainability.
Methodology
Towards this end, the project developed two alternative measures of
depreciation of natural assets: one that projects future values for resource
production, prices and costs; and one that is based on the size of resource
deposits and installed capacity. Using this methodology and drawing on the
Comprehensive Database for Natural Resources and Environment in Latin
America, CID’s green accounting research team adjusted national accounts for
all major Latin American countries for oil, mineral and timber depletion.
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Faculty
Theodore Panayotou
Collaborating Faculty
Robert Cairns, McGill University
Jeffrey Vincent, University of California San Diego
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People |
Publications
Cairns, R.D. "Practical Green Accounting for Commercial Natural Resources." McGill University. (1999)
Hartwick, J.M. and J. Vincent "Resource Depletion, Returns to Scale, and Net National Income." In revision with The Review of Income and Wealth. (1998)
Vincent, J. "A Framework for Forest Accounting." published in Forest Science. (1999)
Vincent, J. "Are Green National Accounts Better?" CID Working Paper no. 63. Environment and Development Paper No.5. (February 2001)
Vincent, J. "Genuine savings in Latin America 1973-97." (August 2000)
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Copyright
© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Last revised 10/31/2007