Selected Issues in Integrated Environmental-Economic Accounting

Calls for environmentally sound and sustainable growth and development reflect a general agreement on the need to integrate environmental objectives into socio-economic planning and policies. 2 National accounts have provided the most widely used indicators for the assessment of economic performance, trends of economic growth and of the economic counterpart of social welfare. However, major drawbacks of national accounts have raised doubts about their usefulness for the measurement of long-term environmentally sound and sustainable economic growth and development. These drawbacks include: the neglect of scarcities of natural resources which threaten the sustainability of output and value added generated in economic production activities; the failure to account for the degradation of environmental quality and its effects on human health and welfare; and accounting for certain environmental protection expenditures as increase in national product but which may instead be considered as social costs of the maintenance of environmental quality. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.