National Accounting and Capital

National Accounting and Capital presents definitive solutions to current problems in national accounting practice. Professor Hartwick deals expertly with problems in accounting natural capital, financial capital and skills capital and communicates his solutions in specially designed national accounting tables or matrices.

Key issues discussed include:

• new developments in the theory of green national accounting, particularly the place of natural resource stocks in the national accounts
• the relationship between dollar valued net national product and sustainable income
• an extension of standard treatments of capital, (buildings, machines, etc.), in the national accounts to deal with natural resources, human capital, and financial capital, (equities of banks and other firms and loans from banks to firms)
• the sustainability of the current path of an economy
• the role of capital gains on 'new' types of capital in the expression for net national product

In addition, Professor Hartwick indicates how to deal with certain long-standing issues involving services to banks in the national accounts. The accounts are always expressed in a national accounting matrix and this makes for consistency in style. He wishes to persuade readers of the value of this approach.

This book will be of immense use to scholars of national and environmental accounting and practitioners in government statistical agencies, the UN, the World Bank and the IMF.