Estimates of total factor productivity growth, a measure of increases in the efficiency of production, have traditionally been based on a two-factor model of labor and fixed capital. Because profits are measured residually in the System of National Accounts, they implicitly include rents on...

Questions about the ultimate size of mineral and energy resource endowments and the degree of fiscal prudence which should be exercised by countries engaged in resource extraction have become central for many developing countries during the recent resource boom. To explore these questions, this...

Biodiversity, a property of natural areas, provides a range of benefits to the economy including bioprospecting rents, knowledge and insurance, ecotourism fees, and ecosystem services. Many of these values can be broken out in the System of National Accounts, leading to better estimates of the...

Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its gross domestic product. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural...

Recent carbon market prices are substantially lower than mean or median estimates of the social cost of carbon in the literature. Intuition would therefore suggest that' investment errors' are being made, in the sense that markets favor higher carbon-emitting projects, while global welfare would...

The authors analyze the determinants of fatalities in 2,194 large flood events in 108 countries between 1985 and 2008. Given that socioeconomic factors can affect mortality right in the aftermath of a flood, but also indirectly by influencing flood frequency and magnitude, they distinguish...

Existing wealth estimates show that in most countries intangible capital is the largest share of total wealth. Intangible capital is calculated as the difference between total wealth and tangible (produced and natural) capital. This paper uses new estimates of total wealth, natural capital, and...

The fact that developing countries do not have carbon emission caps under the Kyoto Protocol has led to the current interest in high-income countries in border taxes on the "virtual" carbon content of imports. The authors use Global Trade Analysis Project data and input-output analysis to...

This paper combines theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. The analysis is used to argue, given what has been learned from the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns to investing in trust...