Valuation as an Issue in National Accounting and Policy Analysis

Abstract

"Recent debates over how to capture the value of various forms of social activity and common environmental resources call for a thorough examination of the concept of value itself. Of late, advocates for various social and environmental causes have remonstrated that since the value of productive work outside the market or of environmental resources is incompletely or inadequately gauged through systems of national accounting, policy-making, which use these as an input, is setback. This is seen to result in harmful real consequences. Groups that claim to represent the interests of the world's women, for example, assert that 'women's work,' which is typically performed at home or exchanged in venues other than money mediated markets, is not adequately valued in traditional measures of national statistics. Similarly, groups that seek to represent environmental concerns have posited that the degradation of forests, air and water represents a net loss to our collective wealth and that aggregate measures of the same should be revised downwards to reflect this loss. The issues raised by these advocates revolve extensively on the issue of valuation. Accordingly, a thorough examination of the concept of value is indispensable to an informed debate on statistical possibilities and policy alternatives."