ISTE Desarrollan una
5. MARCO METODOLÓGICO
5.5 TÉCNICAS DE PROCESAMIENTO Y ANÁLISIS DE DATOS
Antecedents of Environmental Accounting
Recall from 3.1.3 that Ayres and Kneese had been the first to argue that environmental externalities were the norm rather than the exception and needed to be brought fully into account ‘as a materials balance problem for the entire economy’ — ie as a system of stocks and flows, which would then be ‘simultaneously accounted for and related to welfare’ in a general equilibrium approach.510 Economic conceptions of capital as stock and income as flow date back to Fisher’s work around the turn of the 20th century,511 but systems to measure stocks and flows go back much further: the global standard, double-entry accounting, traces its roots back to the 13th century. Until the mid-20th century, however,
509 Salah El Serafy, ‘Sustainability, income measurement and growth’ in Robert Goodland, Herman Daly, Salah El Serafy and Bernd von Droste, Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development: Building on Brundtland (UNESCO 1991) 60.
510 Ayres and Kneese, ‘Production, Consumption and Externalities’, above n 192, 288. The authors cite (at 284) F. Smith, The Economic Theory of Industrial Waste Production and Disposal (draft doctoral dissertation, North Western University, 1967) as the first to express the idea of applying materials balance concepts to waste disposal problems, but as this work is unpublished it is appropriate to attribute the argument to Ayres and Kneese. Note that the authors use the terms ‘inventories’ and ‘capacity to absorb’ where the term ‘stocks’ might now be used.
511 See Irving Fisher, ‘What is Capital?’ (1896) 6 The Economic Journal 509, 514; Irving Fisher, The Nature of
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accounting was a financial rather than economic tool. Accounting for the economy, national accounting, was a product of the need to measure (and so to manage) the output of the economy in support of policy responses to major new economic phenomena in the 20th century: the Great Depression of the 1930s and total mobilisation of production and management of consumption during World War II.512
The implication of the ‘materials balance’ approach was that externalities ‘cannot be properly dealt with by considering environmental media such as air and water in isolation’, but this raised another difficulty:
While we feel that it represents reality with greater fidelity than the usual [partial equilibrium] view, it also implies a central planning problem of impossible difficulty, both from the standpoint of data collection and computation.513
Despite their concerns about the impossibility of turning theory into practice, Kneese and Ayres, with d’Arge, went on to develop a ‘materials balance – general equilibrium’ approach that would be ‘a more or less complete accounting of materials flow for the area’.514 This would facilitate both the pricing of environmental resources and trade-off decisions among discharges, allowing the setting of environmental standards and leaving optimality to be achieved within these ‘fixed constraints’ that would operate alongside the ‘natural constraints’ of resource scarcity.515 The next step would be to use ‘economic base-input- output’ models to project future activity, population growth and other parameter changes, creating, in essence, what would now be described as a modelling application of
environmental-economic accounts. At about the same time, Nordhaus and Tobin were approaching a somewhat similar conclusion from the opposite direction. Concerned about the shortcomings of economic growth as an indicator of economic welfare, they argued
512 See Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry (Allen & Unwin 2011) 180–181. Discussing, at the beginning of World War II, how much of the economic ‘cake’ would remain for civilian consumption after paying for the war effort, Keynes commented that ‘[t]he statistics from which to build up these estimates are very
inadequate. Every government since the last war has been unscientific and obscurantist, and has regarded the collection of essential facts as a waste of money there is no one today, inside or outside government offices, who does not mainly depend on the brilliant private efforts of [academic economist and statistician] Mr Colin Clark …’: John Maynard Keynes, How to Pay For the War (MacMillan, 1940) 13.
513 Ibid 295. This was not unlike the argument of Hayek, that ‘all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected and disseminated, by any one center.’ However, Hayek was making an argument in support of a normative principle of decentralisation: see F A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, (Fiftieth
Anniversary Edition, University of Chicago Press 1994 [1944], 55.)
514 Allen V Kneese, Robert U Ayres and Ralph C d’Arge, Economics and the Environment: A Materials Balance
Approach (Resources for the Future, 1970), 109. This is discussed further in 4.3. 515 Ibid 110.
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for measures of economic welfare that treated capital consumption as an item to be subtracted; this extended to ‘environmental capital’.516
Emergence of Environmental Accounting
Initially, the UN Statistical Office had been as concerned as Ayers and Kneese about measuring the impact of environmental degradation on economic welfare, concluding in 1977 that considerable conceptual and measurement problems meant that estimating the costs of reaching environmental standards or of assessing environmental damage was not a matter for routine statistics but for research and experiment.517 Statistical efforts would be better directed to standardisation.518 By 1983 optimism had grown to the point that UNEP and the World Bank initiated a series of workshops ‘to revise national income calculations in order to reflect in them environmental concerns.’519 Progress was not quick. According to El Serafy, it was not until 1988 that a watershed consensus was reached that the
increasing importance of natural resources and environment was such that ‘a set of environmental satellite accounts needed to be elaborated and attached to the new SNA core accounts, with a view of reflecting environmental considerations.’520 This of course involved conceiving of the interaction of the economy and the environment as a single system of stocks and flows, with natural stocks being analogous to capital in conventional accounting. Thus the metaphor of ‘natural capital’ was born, although one scholar, Victor, soon cautioned about the limits of this analogy (see section 3.7.1).521
The UN continued to develop environmental accounting, publishing a working paper in 1989 and a preliminary draft handbook for a system of environmental-economic accounts as an appendix to the SNA, in 1990.522 With the inclusion in Agenda 21 of
516 Nordhaus and Tobin, ‘Is Growth Obsolete?’, above n 189, 1, 5–6, 49. While the extensive literature on the limits of GDP as the headline indicator of economic growth that followed Nordhaus and Tobin is beyond scope, see Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014).
517 United Nations Statistical Office, ‘The Feasibility of Welfare-Oriented Measures to Supplement the National Accounts and Balances: A Technical Report’, Studies in Methods, Series F No 22, (UN 1977) 54. 518 Ibid.
519 El Serafy, above n 509 60. 520 Ibid 61.
521 See Herman E Daly,‘On Sustainable Development and National Accounts’ in David Collard, David W Pearce and David T Ulph, Economics, Growth and Sustainable Environments: essays in memory of Richard Lecomber (MacMillan, 1988); Salah El Serafy, ‘The Environment as Capital’ in Robert Costanza (ed), Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability (Columbia University Press, 1991) 168. Note that the Brundtland Report (1987) made several references to ‘ecological capital’: WCED, n 7 above, 52. By implication, scholars have also criticised GDP as an inadequate measure of economic performance, and a fortiori, of welfare. The now-significant literature on this topic is beyond scope here, but Daly’s article is an early example.
522 Peter Bartelmus, Sustainable Development, a Conceptual Framework, Working Paper number 13 (Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 1989); Peter Bartelmus, C Stahmer and J van
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recommendations for the development of systems of integrated environmental and economic accounting, the UN went on to develop the SEEA into a full international statistical standard, publishing early versions as guidance documents in 1993 and 2003 and a standard in 2012.
The OECD also showed early signs of engaging with environmental accounting as it began to emerge in the 1980s. Member governments had committed in 1979 to ‘endeavour[ing], to the extent practical, to develop systems to account for changes in environmental quality and related resource stocks’523 and extended this commitment in 1985 to:
improve the management of natural resources, using an integrated approach, with a view to ensuring long-term environmental and economic sustainability. For this purpose, they will develop appropriate mechanisms and techniques including more accurate resource accounts …524
This early support appeared to wane somewhat; an OECD workshop nearly a decade later concluded only that the OECD should continue to ‘continue to provide a forum for the exchange of views’ on accounting.525 While it has since recommended that members improve information on material flows and link environmental and economic information through work on stocks and flows, including on ‘macro-economic aspects of
environmental policies’, 526 the OECD has put more emphasis on developing environmental information tools than on advocating particular approaches to information.527
Early Discussion of Environmental Accounting in Australia
Tongeran, Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting: framework for an SNA satellite system (1991) 37 Review of Income and Wealth, 111.
523 OECD, ‘Declaration on Anticipatory Environmental Policies’, above n 396.
524 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Council), ‘Declaration on Environment: Resource for the Future’, Decision C(85)111 of 20 June 1985, in Environment: Resource for the Future (OECD, 1985).
525 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Environmental Accounting for Decision- Making’, OECD Working Papers Vol III No 65 (OECD 1995) 11.
526 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Recommendation of the Council on Material Flows and Resource Productivity’ 21 April 2004, Decision C(2004)79 (OECD 2004) [4].
527 The OECD has also continued to refine the PSR model used in SoE reporting as a common reference framework and has undertaken a significant program of work on environmental indicators: see for example Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Environmental indicators. OECD core sets. (OECD, 1994); Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Environmental Indicators: Towards Sustainable Development (OECD 2001); Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Green Growth Indicators (OECD 2014). The OECD has also participated in work led by the UN in developing the System of
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Australia’s early interest in environmental accounting waxed then waned. In the mid-1980s Australia championed a broadening of the OECD’s environmental work to include natural resources management. This in turn included the management of these resources as a form of capital. The Australian minister attending the OECD Environment Committee at Ministerial Level pursued a theme of natural resources as natural capital:
To our cost, we have given inadequate attention to the need for an environmentally and economically integrated approach to the management of natural resources, or ‘natural capital’ …
…
We are all aware of the links between the health of our economies and the health of the natural resource capital on which they are based. When natural resources are used without due regard for the broader significance of such use, medium and longer-term problems affecting economic stability can arise. There are many cases throughout the world where acute degradation of land and water resources has removed the very basis of economic growth.528
Subsequently, the Environment Ministerial Council sponsored a visit to Australia in 1986 by Dr Robert Repetto of the World Resources Institute to stimulate discussions between Australian governments of the potential applications of ‘natural resource accounting’ in integrating resource and environmental matters directly with economic development.529 The Council published two papers by Repetto, one reporting on public seminars and discussions with officials.530 This paper noted that ‘there seemed to be a general consensus, although not unanimity, on the desirability of moving ahead with some initial steps toward natural resource accounting in Australia …’ and recommended ‘a sequence of case studies in natural resource accounting leading toward a state-wide set of resource accounts’ to be undertaken in cooperation with the Commonwealth and indeed the AEC more generally.531 Despite noting that the incremental cost of constructing accounts would be relatively
528 Ralph Willis, ‘Natural Resource Management’, statement to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Environment Committee Meeting at Ministerial Level, in OECD, Environment: Resource for the Future, Selected Statements and Documents from the OECD Environment Committee’s Meeting at Ministerial Level Paris, 18–20 June 1985 (OECD Paris 1985) 22.
529 Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment, ‘Project Brief for a Consultancy’, 30 July 1986, (Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment Department file 86/3254).
530 Repetto, Report on natural resource accounting: Information paper on the use of natural resource accounting for countries
with natural resource-based economies and potential first steps in Australia, above n 465. 531 Ibid 22.
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small, the matter was not pursued further at a national level until the ESD initiatives of 1992.532
4.3.2 Increasing General Instrumentalism as Sustainability Policies Emerge in