Green Accounting Bibliography: January 1990
This page contains all items published in the selected month. January archives also include entries for the entire year when the exact month of publication is unknown. The page for January 1990 includes everything published prior to that year.
Citations
Bojö, Jan; Mäler, Karl-Göran and Unemo, Lena. Environment and Development: an economic approach, 1990, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. [order book]
Chapter 4 on "General Equilibrium Analysis and National Accounting" presents green accounting as a necessary step for general equilibrium analyses of economic policies in relation to environment and development.
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link. 
Hartwick, John M. "Natural Resources, National Accounting and Economic Depreciation." Journal of Public Economics 43 (1990): 291-304.
Presents a theoretical framework for green accounting.
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Repetto, Robert; Magrath, William; Wells, Michael; Beer, Christine and Rossini, Fabrizio. Wasting Assets: natural resources in the national income accounts, Washington, D.C., World Resource Institute (1989). [full text, order book]
Pioneering green accounting study.
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Eisner, Robert. "Extended Accounts for National Income and Product." Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 26(4), December 1988: 1611-1684.
Comprehensive survey of efforts to extend the traditional national income accounts in various directions.
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Alonso, William, and Paul Starr, Eds.. The Politics of Numbers. Russell Sage Foundation: New York, 1987.
Survey of how political and sociological decisions are shaped by national statistics and how statistics shape these decisions. Includes a chapter on the "Political Purpose and the National Accounts."
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Review of Income and Wealth, Series 32(2), June 1986. Special Issue on the Review of the United Nations System of National Accounts.
Includes several articles on the reform of the System of National Accounts that was underway at that time (culminating in the publication of the SNA 1993). None of the articles directly discuss green accounting, but Nobel Prize Laureate Sir Richard Stone (1913 - 1991), next to Simon Kuznets one of the creators of the system of national accounts, makes a reference to green accounting when stresses four issues "that deserve mention even if they are not ready for international standardization...Fourth, having got as far as it has in formulating systems of economic, socio-demographic and environmental statistics, I hope the UN Statistical Office will see what can be done to present all this material in a related manner."
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin. 1972. "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Growth, 50th anniversary colloquium V. New York: Columbia University Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Reprinted in: Milton Moss (ed.), The Measurement of Economic and Social Performance, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 38, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1973. [
full text]
One of the first papers acknowledging imperfections in our national income measures. The conclusion: Is growth obsolete? We think not. Although GNP and other national income aggregates are imperfect measures of welfare, the broad picture of secular progress which they convey remains after correction of their most obvious deficiencies. At present there is no reason to arrest general economic growth to conserve natural resources, although there is good reason to provide proper economic incentives to conserve resources which currently cost their users less than true social cost. Population growth cannot continue indefinitely, and evidently it is already slowing down in the United States. This slowdown will significantly increase sustainable per capita consumption. But even with ZPG [zero population growth] there is no reason to shut off technological progress. The classical stationary state need not become our utopian norm. (p. 24)
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Kuznets, Simon S. "How to Judge Quality" The New Republic, 20 October 1962: 29-32.
The article is often taken as an example that even the "father" of our national accounting system acknowledged its shortcomings. Particularly, the end of the first paragraph has found its way in many recent publications on this issue: "[D]istinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long run."
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Studenski, Paul. The income of nations. New York University Press, 1961.
Comprehensive treatise of the history of national accounting.
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.
Hicks, John R. Value and capital, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946 (first published in 1939).
Includes a passage often cited as a justification for comprehensive national income calculations that go beyond what we currently define as "capital" and include human as well as environmental capital: The purpose of income calculation in practical affairs is to give people an indication of the amount which they can consume without impoverishing themselves. Following out this idea, it would seem that we ought to define a man's income as the maximum value which he can consume during a week, and still expect to be as well off at the end of the week as he was at the beginning. (p. 172, 2nd edition)
Posted by Gernot Wagner on 1/01/1990. 0 comments. Permanent link.