Kirk Hamilton - Böcker

Why are some nations wealthy and others poor? How did the wealthy nations become rich? What are the components of wealth? How should nations manage their wealth for the future? These are among the most important questions in economics. They are also impossible to answer without defining wealth, and understanding how it can be created, destroyed, stored, and managed. National Wealth: What is Missing, Why it Matters assembles a collection of high-quality contributions to define the key concepts and address the economic and policy issues around national wealth. It considers insights from economic history, addresses the impacts of the changes to national accounting, and teases out the policy implications for both rich and poor countries and the institutions within them. Using expert analysis and theory backed by empirical work, this book evaluates the progress that has been made in measuring national wealth, as well as the recent developments in theory and practice which tell us that the change in real wealth (net saving) is an essential indicator of economic progress. Net national saving, measured comprehensively and adjusted to reflect the investment in and the depreciation of the full range of assets measured in national wealth, is an indicator of the change in future wellbeing. Governments can use this measure to answer a fundamental question: How much does the stream of future wellbeing of the population rise or fall as a result of policy actions today?The book is organized into four parts. Part one provides the political context and defines the key concepts. Part two examines the history of wealth creation and destruction. Part three provides a more detailed analysis of the individual components of wealth, and finally, part four examines the lessons for managing wealth for sustainable national prosperity.

This path-breaking book focuses on the theory and practice of economic development as viewed from the perspective of sustainability, and the implications of sustainability for development policy. It demonstrates how various indicators can be developed and used to determine whether or not an economy is on a sustainable path of development.The book is concerned with measuring sustainability in a macroeconomic context so that decision makers are more aware of the real trends in the economy and the way in which their policies may affect these trends. The discussion on such measurement includes: the physical indicators of sustainability, resource and environmental accounting, savings and the empirical measurement of sustainable development, international trade and unsustainable development, ecological indicators, income distribution and social needs, and the assessment of structural adjustment policies and their implications for sustainable development. The authors conclude that the first step towards sustainable development is for a greater awareness of the effects of development on the environment, and the environment on human well-being.Measuring Sustainable Development will be particularly welcomed by policymakers and practitioners as well as researchers, academics and students of development economics and environmental economics.

Environmental accounts bring together economic and environmental information in a common framework to measure the contribution of the environment to the economy and the impact of the economy on the environment. They enable governments to set priorities, monitor economic policies more precisely, enact more effective environmental regulations and resource management strategies, and design more efficient market instruments for environmental policies. Many industrialized countries compile environmental accounts, but progress in developing countries has been limited - even though the need for environmental accounts is perhaps more acute in these regions. Environmental Accounting in Action studies the experiences of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, the core countries of a unique, regional environmental accounting programme in Southern Africa. Covering minerals, forestry, fisheries and water, each chapter provides important lessons about sustainable resource management. As a whole, the case studies demonstrate how to overcome the many challenges of constructing environmental accounts and the mechanics of successful implementation. By providing a transparent system of information about the relationship between human activities and the environment, the accounts have improved policy dialogue among different stakeholders and have played a significant role in environmental policy design.This book advances a powerful argument for the use of environmental accounts and is a major contribution to the environmental literature on developing countries. Environmental and ecological economists, resource managers, policymakers, NGOs and anyone concerned with sustainable development will find this an informative and valuable read.

This important book presents fresh thinking and new results on the measurement of sustainable development. Economic theory suggests that there should be a link between future wellbeing and current wealth. This book explores this linkage under a variety of headings: population growth, technological change, deforestation and natural resource trade. While the relevant theory is presented briefly, the chief emphasis is on empirical measurement of the change in real wealth: this measure of net or 'genuine' saving is a key indicator of sustainable development. The methodological and empirical work is bolstered by tests of the predictive power of genuine saving in explaining future consumption and economic growth. Just as importantly, the authors show that many resource-abundant countries would be considerably wealthier today had they managed to save and invest the profits from natural resource exploitation in the past.Wealth, Welfare and Sustainability will be of great interest to environmental and resource economists, specialists in 'sustainability' indicators from other disciplines and also development and growth economists.