Previous studies of deforestation have focused on agriculture, population and migration, timber exploitation, macroeconomic policies and geographic factors to explain the variability of deforestation rates among countries. This study tests the hypothesis that countries with a high proportion of petroleum or non-petroleum mineral exports in total exports experience a relatively low deforestation rate because of macroeconomic ‘Dutch disease’ effects. Bivariate and multivariate analyses provide preliminary support for the hypothesis, although they give little insight on how precisely mineral exports might exert their influence on forest cover. One reason for the limited utility of these methodologies is that they do not adequately explain the various effects of mineral windfalls that go beyond the Dutch disease's ‘core model’. Future research must attempt to understand these effects, which include: levels of funding for agriculture, roads, and directed settlement; agricultural protectionism; levels of rural poverty, urbanization, and consumer demand; the site-level effects of mineral extraction; and the variability of state autonomy.

This paper investigates the theory and practice of adjusting national income and product accounts for the stock and depletion of mineral assets. These green income adjustments can have a significant impact on the accounts of mineral-based developing economies and the macroeconomic policies that might be derived from these accounts. We propose that the popular methods used to adjust the accounts for the impacts of mineral assets and depletion are upwardly biased, and we present alternative stock valuation and depletion formulas that are empirically supported variants of the formulas currently in use.

This study estimates depreciation values for timber extraction activities in the Brazilian Amazon for 1990 and 1995. A generalized approach following Vincent and Hartwick (1997) is applied enabling us to calculate depreciation based on all three methods proposed in the literature. We also calculate Hotelling rents for timber as a whole and for mahogany alone. Apart from the expected differences in the results for each method, the results show substantially low depreciation estimates as a direct consequence of the high timber stocks and scarcity perception by economic agents due to the lack of property rights in the region. For mahogany alone we obtain substantially higher values. We conclude that if scarcity rents are not fully perceived, or they really do not exist in such huge supply conditions as our estimates may suggest, charges related to other forest services are fundamental to make environmental accounting an useful tool for planning in the Amazonian context.

The objective of the study is to construct forest resource accounts for the state of Maharashtra in India and incorporate the value of depletion and degradation of forest resources into the system of national accounts (SNA). The net state domestic product (NSDP) is adjusted for the depletion of the forest resources to obtain Environmentally adjusted net state domestic product (ESDP). The results show that the value added by forests is 3.56 per cent of NSDP and the value of depletion is 19.8 per cent of the estimated value added. The ESDP of Maharashtra is found to be 99.3 per cent of the estimated NSDP. The study has demonstrated that, although the existing database needs further improvement, forest resource accounting is feasible for the state of Maharashtra in India and can serve as an indicator of economy's performance.

An environmental accounting approach is adopted to adjust current measures of national income and net savings in SA for the value of net accumulation in timber and carbon stocks as well as for the value of water abstraction externality of cultivated forests. Results indicated that the said values missing from current measures of income and capital formation are substantial, amounting to about 0.6 per cent of NNP, on average over the study period. Potential VAD lost to agriculture due to water abstraction by cultivated forests was estimated at R104 million per annum, on average since 1981. This estimate, however, did not account for the social costs associated with potential losses of environmental services from affected ecosystems.

Previous empirical studies assessing sustainability have adopted the weak sustainability indicator (WSI) which measures changes in the stock of physical and natural capital. Whereas these studies have been retrospective, we use a dynamic general equilibrium model to investigate global and regional sustainability over the period 1985–2050, focusing on fossil fuel extraction. Our standard scenario predicts increasing WSI values suggesting global sustainability in all periods to 2050 as, despite a rising world oil price, the introduction of backstop fuels in 2010 provides an alternative source of energy. A more pessimistic scenario examines possible outcomes in the absence of energy saving technological change and backstops fuels. WSI values still indicate global sustainability, though economic growth is only half that predicted by the more optimistic model, and two countries—USA and Brazil—are unsustainable.