Environmental Statistics and the National Accounts

Abstract This chapter begins by surveying some of the solutions which have been adopted to the problem of environmental and natural resource accounting. Measures of national income such as GNP/GDP from the systems of national accounts (SNA) until recently did not reflect changes in environmental resources. The roles of both physical and monetary systems of environmental statistics are discussed, and it is shown how these can be incorporated into the SNA scheme. A possible means of using such a statistical framework for the basis of economic analysis is then discussed and illustrated with particular reference to Indonesia. It is suggested that a social accounts matrix can be extended to include ‘environmental multipliers’ which capture the effects on the environment. While such multipliers do not show all the environmental implications, they do demonstrate that modelling environmental effects is possible using just a little more information than is available in a typical social accounting matrix.