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Accounting for Environmental Services: Contrasting the SEEA and the ENRAP Approaches
Author(s) -
Peskin Henry M.,
Delos Angeles Marian S.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/1475-4991.00012
Subject(s) - national accounts , depreciation (economics) , economics , accounting , natural resource , order (exchange) , national income and product accounts , accounting method , environmental resource management , finance , microeconomics , ecology , profit (economics) , financial capital , capital formation , biology
Both the System of Integrated Environment and Economic Accounting (SEEA) and the Environmental and Natural Resources Accounting Project (ENRAP) are efforts to expand conventional national economic accounts in order to better reflect interactions between the market economy and the natural environment. In order to maintain a close relationship to the System of National Accounts (SNA) accounting standards, SEEA adopts conventional definitions of productive sectors. However, SEEA fails to account for many valuable services of the natural environment and encourages the use of techniques that provide misleading and poor estimates of depreciation and damage to the environment. ENRAP addresses these deficiencies by explicitly recognizing that the natural environment is a productive economic sector. ENRAP encourages the use of imputation approaches that draw on techniques common in the environmental economics literature. These approaches are consistent with definitions of depreciation and environmental damage widely accepted in economic theory. The principles that underlie the ENRAP approach provide a basis for contrasting ENRAP and SEEA empirically. Using Philippine data, SEEA‐type estimates are compared with those of ENRAP.