MEASURING THE DEPRECIATION OF AUSTRALIA NONRENEWABLE RESOURCES - A CAUTIONARY TALE

The pursuit of sustainability is widely seen as requiring the calculat ion and publication of environmentally adjusted measures of national i ncome, and/or of economic indicators intended to show whether or not e conomic behaviour is consistent with sustainability requirements. In e ither case a measure of natural resource depreciation is needed. The p aper restricts its attention to non-renewable mineral resources, and m easures their depreciation in Australia according to different methods proposed in the literature, using data published by the Australian Bu reau of Statistics. The different methods are found to yield strikingl y different results. The conclusion is that robust measurement of natu ral resource depreciation is unlikely, and that results appertaining t o such should be treated sceptically. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.