It is possible for a country to act in such a way as to deplete its forests, exhaust its mineral resources, pollute its waters, and deplete its fisheries and wildlife without affecting measured GDP or GNP. In fact, activities such as mining or environmental cleanup, will actually contribute positively to a countries national account measures. Conversely, a country could vastly improve the quality or fertility of its land and natural resources and these improvements would not be reflected as increases in GDP/GNP.
National accounts are actually inadequate measures of a country's long-term economic welfare as they do not take into account activities, such as resource depletion, which will ultimately affect economic growth. The accounting systems also ignore or mislabel many of the costs and benefits associated with natural resources and environmental quality. The costs of reducing the adverse effects of environmental degradation are treated as ordinary investment and consumption activities. Damages caused by pollution usually are included only to the extent that they influence productivity. Environmental services provided by the natural environment (waste disposal, pollution clean-up and dispersion etc.) are not accounted for at all.
Financial Accounting Systems :
Corporate financial statements also exclude estimates of social costs beyond those directly impacting the bottom line. However, there are guidelines on the reporting of environmental liabilities - these pertain to likely remediation and liability issues, rather than long-term social issues. These liabilities are often reported in the statementes footnot since their magnitude is unknown.
Managerial/Cost Accounting Systems
Most corporate managerial accounting systems do not track costs closely. Easily identifiable costs, such as labor or raw materials, are often finely tracked and allocated to particular product or process lines, but many costs - such as administration costs and environment, health, and safety costs, are considered to be indirect or overhead costs and are allocated broadly across product and process lines. Placing a cost in an overhead account allows it to be shared across activities, but generally removes cost responsibility from any one particular product line or manager. If no one is responsible for a cost, it is likely to be ignored, or in the worst case, may increase as a result of efforts to reduce other costs.
1.5 What is Full Cost Accounting?
Full cost accounting describes how goods and services should be priced to reflect their true costs (including environmental and other social costs). Depending on the type of accounting system involved it can thus relate to national, financial, or managerial/cost accounting. With full cost accounting, natural resources would be factored into calculations of a country's GDP; natural resources would be redefined as assets on company ledgers; and environmental costs would be built into a product's cost.
To confuse issues slightly, within each
毕业论文 type of accounting system, the term full cost accounting may be used to refer to either the full private (or bottom line) costs to an enterprise of an activity, or more correctly, the full social costs to society of the activity including externalities (such as health impacts resulting from ozone depletion). Externalities are costs not borne by the responsible entity, for example, the ecological impacts of climate change resulting from automobile emissions are not included in the price consumers pay for petroleum. In its correct formulation, full cost accounting should refer to all social costs. However, this is difficult in practice and many attempts at full cost accounting (particularly in managerial accounting efforts) have stopped at the level of incorporation of private costs.
2. Incorporating social and environmental costs into accounting systems:
National Accounts:
As discussed earlier, national accounts do not record changes in environmental quality and most natural resources and ignore or mislabel many of the costs and benefits associated with natural resources and the environment. Amending the accounts to correct these problems requires:
Expanding the set of goods treated as national assets to include uncounted environmental and natural resources - this is called expanding asset account boundaries. This would also involve computing values for depletion and degradation of natural assets. Some economists have attempted to calculate Net Domestic Product (NDP) measures by subtracting the values resulting from the depreciation of natural assets, and the depletion and degradation of natural resources from GDP measures. For example, the GDP measures for a country in Indonesia were adjusted for resource depletion and consumption by Repetto for the World Resources Institute in 1989. This study showed that the conventionally measured GDP overstated the true growth of net income. While the GDP increased by about 7.7% annually, the NDP figures rose by only 3.9% annually. This means that half of the recorded growth during the period was generated by drawing down natural resources rather than by sustainable productivity increases.
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