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Project title

Expanding the National Accounts in Ireland: Towards Measuring Sustainability

Primary Funding Agency

Environmental Protection Agency

Co-Funding Organisation(s)

n/a

Lead Organisation

University College Dublin (UCD)

Lead Applicant

Susana Ferreira

Project Abstract

This thesis focuses on the economic measurement of sustainability and well-being. Measuring implies being capable of comparing different states to judge within a given framework which one is better and if something needs to be done to improve current policies. The thesis is developed in two parts: a macro-level analysis on sustainability and a micro-level analysis on current well-being. At macro level sustainable development is defined as a path characterised by non-declining well-being over time which coincides with non-declining comprehensive wealth inclusive of natural and human capital. A measure of i'genuinei investment (which includes some of the negative externalities arising from air pollution) is estimated and used to assess the sustainability of a developed country such as Ireland over the period 1995-2005. In sharp contrast with previous literature and with existent World Bank estimates the final results show that Ireland may have experienced sustainability problems in the past. The erosion of natural capital was recently compensated by growing investment in man-made and human capital signifying that Ireland is currently weakly sustainable. However the inclusion of externalities typically not taken into consideration when building macroeconomic indicators of sustainability may lead to completely different conclusions regarding the sustainability of developed countries. Nevertheless assessing and estimating the impact of environmental factors on well-being is difficult and costly. The second part of the thesis addresses this issue. First self-reported measures of well-being (SWB) are linked to GIS spatially-referenced environmental attributes to assess which local-specific environmental goods (or bads) are important determinants of well-being and should be included in sustainability indicators. Second comprehensive theoretical and methodological frameworks are built to show how SWB data could be used to compute the willingness to pay (or to accept) for environmental changes and to built quality of life indices. It is shown that currently empirical estimates of monetary values with the SWB approach suffer from systematic upward bias. This caveat does not apply when building quality of life indices and in general when assessing the effect of local environmental goods on individualis well-being. This is validated by the last Chapter which confirms that local climate and water pollution affect individualis well-being directly even after controlling for reporting biases suggesting that policy interventions aiming at improving environmental quality are unambiguously well-being

Grant Approved

�75,000.00

Research Hub

Sustainability

Research Theme

Socio-Economic Considerations

Start Date

n/a

Initial Projected Completion Date

n/a