Proposal to slash tariffs

a proposal by the us to slash tariffs on paper, wooden furniture and other forest products worldwide will have little impact on the global timber harvest or the environment, a White House study said.

Hefty price

american Electric Power ( aep ) Company officials said it could cost over us $2 billion for the company to install pollution controls systems.

In nature's backyard

Weighing the cost

goa will soon become the first state in the country to adopt national resource accounting -- a concept that weighs the environmental cost vis--vis economic growth. "This concept has been utilised for specific projects, but Goa will become the first region to adopt it for an entire state," says K S R V S Challam, director of Goa's planning and statistics department.

Paying the price

INDIA loses about US $80 billion every year on account of sickness and death from pollution and economic costs attributable to resource degradation, says the World Bank's annual Environmental Review. The loss due to poor environment is pegged in excess of US $20 billion a year by conventional calculations, and nearly US $80 billion in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, the report says.

Nature's bounty

IT is time that governments and corporations took account of the free services provided by nature, which are worth many thousands of billions of dollars a year, urged a panel of us scientists and economists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at Seattle recently. "In order to protect the environment in the next century, we have to give an economic value to nature's 'ecosystem services' ranging from water purification and waste recycling to soil fertility and insect pollination," said Jane Lubchenco, president of the AAAS.

Change of heart

IT MAY have been slow in coming, but now a definite respect for green tax measures can be discerned in the developed world, especially in the US. A recent survey of state environmental tax provisions by the Centre for Global Change (CGC), US, has revealed that various states have enacted more than 250 green tax measures.

"Hello, there are leftovers"

the World Bank (wb) study -- The Cost of Inaction: Valuing the Economy-Wide Cost of Environmental Degradation in India -- (reviewed in Down To Earth (dte), Vol 5, No 10), has been an eye-opener.

Wrenching control

The unique selling point of Sixto Roxas's social accounting matrix is its generous flexibility. "First and foremost," says Roxas, "the social accounting matrix provides a precise description of the ecological and economic circumstances of the community." Thus, apart from its function as a constantly upgraded community financial ledger, it can be used to assess the intensity of resource use within a particular community, where the intensity is measured by the total number of transactions between different production sectors in the village.

The paradox of nature and balanced accounts

SOME economists and planning pundits are foxed by a paradox. While their timetested tools for measuring economic development -- Gross and Net Domestic Product -- indicate that a country is growing rich, they still find themselves at a loss to explain the hidden reality behind the columns of their balance sheet -- a reality that says that countries are actually getting poorer in productive natural resources.