IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bwu/eiiwdp/disbei125.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

SEEA Revision: Accounting for Sustainability?

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Bartelmus

    (Columbia University, Department of Economics)

Abstract

The 1993 United Nations System for integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) aimed at measuring the - environmental - sustainability of economic performance and growth in terms of produced and natural capital maintenance. To this end it advanced "greened" economic indicators, notably Environmentally-adjusted net Domestic Product (EDP) and Capital Formation (ECF). A revised (draft) version of the 1993 handbook, entitled "Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003" (IEEA), is now available on the web site of the United Nations Statistics Division. Despite its extensive discussion of sustainable development, the IEEA 2003 fails in measuring overall sustainability as it shuns monetary valuation of environmental impacts in a modular framework for physical, hybrid and - selective - monetary accounts. The revision thus missed an opportunity to bridge the persisting dichotomy between ecological and economic sustainability analysis. Future work should explore and test the capability of material flow and environmentally adjusted economic indicators to capture the elusive notions of strong and weak sustainability of economic activity.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Bartelmus, 2004. "SEEA Revision: Accounting for Sustainability?," EIIW Discussion paper disbei125, Universitätsbibliothek Wuppertal, University Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:bwu:eiiwdp:disbei125
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://eiiw.wiwi.uni-wuppertal.de/fileadmin/eiiw/Daten/Publikationen/Gelbe_Reihe/disbei_125.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    environmental accounting; sustainability; capital maintenance; dematerialization; green GDP; valuation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O56 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Oceania
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bwu:eiiwdp:disbei125. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Frank Hoffmann (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://elpub.bib.uni-wuppertal.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.