معیار و پایداری بانک جهانی <پس انداز واقعی>

In order to consider the depletion of natural capital in national income accounting, the World Bank has developed a composite indicator known as ‘genuine savings’ incorporating several environmental indicators. This paper examines the conceptual and empirical characteristics and policy implications of the measure. Analysis shows that the measure is conceptually and empirically imperfect. The policy implications based on this measure are erroneous. The paper suggests that a global approach is needed to appropriately address sustainability issues and to incorporate natural capital in national accounting.

Traditional measures of saving and investment are based on income-based measures. The natural environment is excluded from the accounting algorithm. Thus depreciation of physical capital is included but depletion of environmental resources is not. The World Bank has made an attempt to include natural and human capital into the saving measurement. It has developed a measure known as ‘genuine saving’, which encompasses physical, human and natural capital. The purpose of this paper is to critically appraise this measure. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the genuine savings measure. Section 3 undertakes a conceptual critique of the measure. Section 4 gives an empirical critique of the measure. Policy relevance of the measure is discussed in Section 5. Section 6 contains concluding remarks.

In this paper the World Bank's genuine savings measure and its policy implications have been examined. On the surface the genuine savings measure seems useful as it calls for such good things as net investment in physical capital, investment in education, and subtraction from GDP of net value of natural resource depletion and the net value of environmental damage. However, the measure is conceptually defective since it is based on ‘weak sustainability’ which recent scientific evidence shows is untenable. This paper also demonstrates that the measure is empirically redundant. Education expenses strongly influence numerical values of genuine savings. For the majority of countries representing three-fourths of the world population, genuine savings (without education expenses) are almost identical to unadjusted net savings. Being GDP dependent, the genuine savings measure positively projects high income countries in terms of sustainability. The policy implications of the genuine savings measure can be trivial. Contrary to the suggestion from the genuine saving measure, it is noted that many advanced countries are significantly exceeding their ecological footprint and are accumulating substantial ecological debt levels vis-à-vis developing countries. Given the ecological overshoot at the global level, it is futile to develop country-wise sustainability indicators based on weak sustainability ignoring global externalities and destruction of the global commons by advanced economies. Such indicators offer misleading policy recommendations. Thus the genuine savings measure should not be viewed as an indicator of sustainability. Natural capital should be treated independent of physical and human capital, and environmental sustainability should be viewed from a global perspective. Effort should be directed at developing true sustainable development indicators reflecting true values of the global resources that nations are consuming and the global ecological debt they are incurring.