social assistance and labour supply the longitudinal 1988 89 lmas makes it possible to study the interaction between social assistance and labour supply while allowing for substantial time dependence tobit equations for hours worked on and off social assistance which allow for endogenous selection of social assistance status are estimated by using fiml small but statistically significant effects for a social assistance benefit variable are obtained particularly for females a claw back variable is not consistently useful the wage rate has a consistently negative coefficient in the selection equations and is important in the tobit equations in this paper an attempt is made to reconcile results found in earlier literature jel classification i38 j22 aide sociale et offre de travail l etude longitudinale de l enquete de 1988 89 sur la population active rend possible l etude de l interaction entre l aide sociale et l offre de travail tout en permettant la prise en compte de l effet d inertie herite du passe on calibre des equations tobit pour les heures travaillees separement pour les personnes qui recoivent et ne recoivent pas d aide sociale et une equation probit qui permet une selection endogene du statut d assiste social en utilisant la methode du maximum de vraisemblance avec pleine information on obtient des impacts faibles mais statistiquement significatifs des prestations d aide sociale sur l offre de travail pour les femmes une variable qui tente de capturer les effets de recouvrement fiscal des prestations n est pas uniformement utile comme source d explication le taux de salaire a un coefficient negatif de maniere generale dans les equations de selection et est important dans les equations tobit le memoire tente de reconcilier ces resultats avec ceux que contiennent les etudes anterieures

unanticipated aggregate disturbances and tests of the life cycle consumption model several recent studies have used data on food consumption from the panel study of income dynamics psid to test t he rational expectations life cycle hypothesis against the alternative of prevalent liquidity constraints these tests invoke the rational expectations restriction that income forecast errors are independent of lagged information this restriction however applies only in a time series context it is possible that unanticipated macroeconomic disturbances cause forecast errors to be correlated with lagged information in a cross section of families the authors present evidence of such a correlation in the psid data show that this correlation biases previous tests of the life cycle model toward rejection and derive a proper test of the life cycle model using pa nel data copyright 1993 by mit press

the concept of natural capital the natural environment is now commonly viewed as a form of capital asset or natural capital also included are ecosystems that provide important goods and services to the economy managing natural capital has consequences for sustainable development however there are contrasting weak versus strong sustainability views which in turn have implications for green accounting natural resource based sovereign wealth funds have emerged as key financial instruments for compensating resource depreciation with greater economy wide investments recent scientific evidence recommends demarcating safe operating spaces to limit exploitation of critical global biophysical subsystems or processes these challenges suggest that the concept of natural capital is pivotal to sound policy

measuring natural capital towards accounts for the uk and a basis for improved decision making the paper describes the ongoing project begun by the uk office for national statistics and the department for the environment food and rural affairs in 2011 to compile comprehensive natural capital accounts for the uk it describes the basis on which the accounts have been constructed discusses key issues which have arisen and presents the results to date it also sets out how restoration accounts for individual projects can not only facilitate conventional cost benefit analysis but also add to relevant material for decision makers more widely the paper describes how natural capital accounts can underpin well based decision making for example in implementation of the uk government s new 25 year plan for the environment in addition by providing information on one of the missing capitals such accounts can augment analysis of the behaviour of the economy generally

the determinants of welfare participation of female heads of household in canada this paper assesses the impact on the probability of welfare participation of budget constraint variables such as the expected wage welfare benefit level and implicit welfare tax rate the empirical results are based on a model of welfare participation that is estimated using a sample of female heads of household in canada the coefficients on the budget constraint variables are significant and carry signs that are generally consistent with the predictions of the model and the results of related studies based on data from the united states in addition to the budget constraint variables which include important policy tools a wide range of sociodemographic variables are included in the specification

did canadian welfare reform work the effects of new reform strategies on social assistance participation this paper measures the extent to which declines in social assistance sa participation were associated with novel and aggressive reforms referred to as new reform strategies work requirements diversion earning exemptions and time limits controlling for province specific benefit levels eligibility requirements gdp growth labour market conditions and demographics sa participation rates were more than one percentage point lower equivalent to a 13 decline in provinces with new reforms work requirements with strong sanctions had the sharpest negative associations new reform strategies explain at least 10 of observed declines in sa participation twice that of benefit levels and eligibility requirements

time limits and welfare use time limits represent a substantial departure from previous welfare policy theory suggests that their effects should vary according to the age of the youngest child of the family i test this prediction using data from the current population survey and find that time limits indeed have larger effects on families with younger children i further estimate that anticipatory responses to time limits have decreased welfare use by 6 to 7 percent accounting for 12 to 13 percent of the decline in welfare use during the late 1990s

welfare reform when recipients are forward looking in 1996 the aid to families with dependent children program was replaced with the temporary assistance for needy families tanf program this paper considers the effects of two specific components of tanf time limits and work requirements on employment marriage and welfare participation a discrete choice dynamic programming model is used and parameter estimates are obtained using data from the panel study of income dynamics policy simulations show that a five year lifetime time limit results in a 60 percent reduction in welfare use and that a substantial part of this reduction occurs because recipients are forward looking

infrastructure policy and brexit infrastructure is affected in a variety of ways by brexit in some areas such as aviation rail and energy there are single market activities at various stages of maturity in other areas such as water and waste regulatory standards have had considerable impact in the past and there are current directives in preparation these regulations can now be rethought to suit british distinctiveness technological change and market developments also require changes in how economic regulation is done which is an opportunity opened up by brexit

canadian lone mother employment rates policy change and the us welfare reform literature the article examines the rise in canadian lone mother employment rates during the 1990s using data from the canadian labour force survey and methods borrowed from the united states welfare reform literature patterns of lone mother employment rate increases in canada are found to be similar to those in the united states income support policies in both countries changed in similar directions and in both cases increased the incentive to work despite these parallel changes it appears that unlike the united states policy reforms account for only a small part of the rise in canadian lone mother employment rates

segmented trends and non stationary time series since the influential work of charles r nelson and charles plosser 1982 many empirical studies have concluded that macroeconomic time series are difference stationary this paper proposes the segmented trend model as an alternative in which the series is the sum of a nonstationary trend and a stationary cycle and where the trend shows infrequent shifts the paper proposes tests between the difference stationary and segmented trends models and applies these to the data of nelson and plosser in general the results indicate that prices are difference stationary but quantities follow segmented trend processes copyright 1989 by royal economic society

the permanent income hypothesis estimation and testing by instrumental variables the permanent income hypothesis with rational expectation is restated estimated and tested by an instrumental variables technique on the postwar u s aggregate time series data the hypothesis is accepted on a consumption series which includes service flows from consumer durables if the consumption series is the one in the national income and product accounts the hypothesis is decisively rejected an explanation is suggested to reconcile the conflicting test results

positive freedom markets and the welfare state the comparative merits of market and certain distinguished non market resource allocation mechanisms have continually been at the centre of debate in economics and political philosophy doubtless it will remain there for here one faces the grandest of human concerns embracing as it does issues bearing on liberty and welfare the aspirations of people their potential and re alized capabilities and the fulfillment of their needs it enables us to see individuals in a social context to ask about the possible features of a civil society the obligations that people may have to themselves to one another and to agencies then again we are able to enquire into the obli gations that agencies have to people and to one another the extent to which responsibility needs to be delegated among offices and persons the role that dispersed information may play in an swers to these and so on the debate is central to any discussion of the kind of society we ought to aspire to be members of

infrastructure why it is under provided and badly managed the paper records the substantial deficiencies that exist in the design and implementation of infrastructure programmes around the world it points to three sources of failure the first is a failure to recognize the systems nature of infrastructure and the implication of this for the appropriate tools of analysis that should be employed in infrastructure assessments the second is a preoccupation with income and expenditure flows rather than balance sheets in reporting public as well as private sector infrastructure accounts this has had profound and in many cases perverse implications for the ownership funding and operation of infrastructure the third is inadequate governance of infrastructure programmes to overcome the significant commitment problems that afflict both private and public sector providers of infrastructure the paper describes a set of responses that recognize the systems nature of infrastructure the importance of balance sheets and the need for commitment mechanisms in the private and public sectors to promote the efficient provision of infrastructure

the receipt of transfer payments by immigrants to canada using the native born as a benchmark we examine immigrants reliance on canadas social safety net we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in unemployment insurance and social assistance than natives we also find that assimilation leads to greater participation in both these programs more recent immigrant cohorts have higher recipiency rates than their predecessors the results for social assistance contrast with u s evidence that the raw entry participation rates of many immigrant cohorts exceed the native rates finally our analysis of rent subsidies shows that immigrants initially have higher rates of participation which fall with assimilation excerpt

breaking the cycle the effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients abstract we examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves our data consist of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a canadian province linked with their own and their parents welfare records we address potential endogeneity problems by 1 controlling for ability using past test scores 2 using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects and 3 using a heckman singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator graduation would reduce the probability of welfare receipt of drop outs by 1 2 to 3 4 effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods

transitions from welfare and the employment prospects of low skill workers this study examines the effects that labor market conditions and welfare policy changes had on single mothers welfare participation and economic outcomes using longitudinal individual level data from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the survey of income and program participation sipp the study uses special versions of the sipp panels that include state and county identifiers and links the individual information to county specific measures of low skill employment opportunities and state measures of welfare policies it estimates transition models of program entry and exit and regression models of economic outcomes the study finds that employment conditions and welfare benefit levels were significant determinants of single mothers welfare participation and economic success over the period 1992 95 however it does not find statistically distinguishable differences in participation and economic success between states that did and did not reform their welfare programs through waivers to the federal rules jel classification i3 j3

trends random walks and tests of the permanent income hypothesis abstract recent studies find that consumption is excessively sensitive to income these studies assume that income is stationary around a deterministic trend the data however do not reject the hypothesis that disposable personal income is a random walk with drift if income is indeed a random walk then the standard testing procedure is greatly biased toward finding excess sensitivity moreover if income follows either a more general non stationary process or a borderline stationary process this procedure is also seriously biased

the integration of natural capital into development policies in response to the united nations sustainable development goals there has been a rising awareness of the need to address simultaneously the preservation of natural capital stocks and poverty alleviation at multiple scales focusing on tropical forest rich developing countries the article overviews the extent to which natural capital considerations are integrated into existing development policies and interventions the review finds that the explicit consideration of natural resources is left out of many commonly applied development interventions leading to suboptimal and unsustainable outcomes the interventions that do tackle both development and conservation goals are often not coordinated and are implemented at a site by site basis without providing the socially efficient levels of natural capital stocks or ensuring the long term sustainability of the development and conservation impacts bringing in perspectives from development economics environmental economics and applied conservation this article makes the case for a better integration of development and conservation goals in interventions in developing countries and outlines the emerging frontiers for research and policy

this blessed plot when should capital gains on land be regarded as income national balance sheets for a number of advanced economies show land to be a valuable form of natural capital whose value has increased sharply over the last twenty years or so this paper investigates when or whether capital gains on land should be counted as a component of income while development projects can lead to increases in rental rates and land values it is shown that although the benefits any project should be counted as income increases in rental rates and land values should not normally be seen as additional real income however if land benefits from exogenous land saving technical progress the resulting capital gains can be seen as income applying the same principle to human capital it is shown on a steady growth path that these capital gains are equal to weitzman s 1997 growth premium in the relationship between income and sustainable consumption

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change the stern review calls for immediate decisive action to stabilize greenhouse gases because the benefits of strong early action on climate change outweighs the costs the economic analysis supporting this conclusion consists mostly of two basic strands the first strand is a formal aggregative model that relies for its conclusions primari ly upon imposing a very low discount rate concerning this discount rate aspect i am skeptical of the review s formal analysis but this essay points out that we are actual ly a lot less sure about what interest rate should be used for discounting climate change than is commonly acknowledged the review s second basic strand is a more intuitive argument that it might be very important to avoid possibly large uncertain ties that are difficult to quantify concerning this uncertainty aspect i argue that it might be recast into sound analytical reasoning that might justify some of the review s conclusions the basic issue here is that spending money to slow global warming should perhaps not be conceptualized primarily as being about consump tion smoothing as much as being about how much insurance to buy to offset the small change of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary savings

agriculture after brexit the paper considers the impact of the common agricultural policy cap on the uk and sets out three options for a new british agricultural policy after brexit these options are carrying over the subsidy regime with an emphasis on food security and self sufficiency maintaining the cap architecture but shifting more of the cap subsidies away from payments for land ownership towards more spending on environmental schemes and providing public money only for public goods the third option is advocated after a transitional path allows time for farmers to adapt

the evolution of welfare participation among canadian lone mothers 1973 1991 canadian lone mothers under age thirty five exhibited an increasing reliance on welfare income along with stagnant wages and declining levels of market work and earnings between 1973 and 1991 in contrast lone mothers age thirty five and over exhibited a decreasing reliance on welfare income along with rising levels of market work wages and earnings a key factor accounting for rising welfare use among younger lone mothers was a decline in wages relative to welfare benefits accompanied by a mixed pattern of demographic change falling family size offset by growing proportions of lone mothers who are never married much of the declining welfare use among older lone mothers can be explained by decreasing family size and increasing education accompanied by market wages that grew at the same rate as welfare benefits

welfare participation and labour market behaviour in canada in this paper bivariate probit estimation procedures and nonindependent selectivity adjustments are employed to investigate the determinants of the joint welfare participation labor supply decisions made by single males single females lone fathers and lone mothers using data from the 1988 89 labour market activity survey the bivariate probit results indicate that the welfare and labor force participation decisions are not independent welfare program parameters however such as the basic allowance and the program tax rate generally do not appear to influence the welfare participation labor force participation or hours worked decisions rather these decisions are more strongly associated with personal characteristics and labor market conditions

an untold story the characteristics of welfare use in british columbia the dynamics of welfare participation are analyzed using a unique longitudinal data set derived from provincial administrative records over the period 1980 92 the principal findings are that the majority of welfare spells are experienced by single men and women without children and that while most welfare spells are short there is a high incidence of recidivism although continuous long term use and dependence on welfare is not characteristic of most recipients experiences the program does not provide an effective route to financial independence since most users periodically return to the program

what causes public assistance caseloads to grow this paper uses state panel data to investigate changes in public assistance caseloads through the end of the afdc program in 1996 with particular attention to the rapid increase in caseloads between 1990 and 1994 previous research has focused on total caseloads with attention to economic and policy variables and does a relatively poor job of explaining this caseload increase this paper utilizes a much richer set of control variables to investigate the causes of caseload change it separates afdc caseloads into three subcomponent programs separately investigating changes within the afdc up program afdc child only cases and the remaining core afdc cases with benefits paid to single mothers and their children and it explores whether this caseload rise was driven by changes in takeup rates versus in eligibility the results indicate a large unexplained rise in total afdc caseloads even with a very rich specification a good share of this is due to sharp increases in child only cases driven by program and demographic shifts to a lesser extent this rise was caused by the expansion of afdc up to all states these two factors explain half of the overall rise and all of the unexplained rise in afdc caseloads the remaining increase in core afdc cases benefits received by single mothers and their children is well explained within the model and is the result of economic demographic political and policy changes these variables appear to have increased eligibility among the core afdc population in the early 1990s during the economic slowdown takeup rates also increased during this time period but not by a large amount

the assessment consumer expenditure this article aims to illuminate two sets of consumption puzzles the first concerns the behavior of aggregate saving rates in the 1980s and early 1990s collapse and rebound in scandinavia and the u k and apparently a more secular decline in the u s the second set of puzzles concerns various apparent contradictions of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis e g in time series the excess sensitivity of consumption changes to anticipated income changes and in cross sections the tendency of consumption and income age profiles to follow each other more than standard life cycle theory implies the article discusses in relatively non technical terms the implications both for euler equations and solved out consumption functions of introducing uncertainty credit constraint consumption leisure interactions habits and durability alternative to rational expectations the illiquidity of some assets and financial deregulation it also compares the merits of euler and solved out models of aggregate consumption

national accounting for infrastructure this article discusses how more systematic information can be compiled about the state of the uk infrastructure it stresses the importance of considering the stock and not just the flow of new infrastructure investment it draws attention to the information about the balance sheet that is contained for all sectors of the economy in the national accounts as part of their integrated stock flow structure while there appears to be no internationally agreed convention about the definition of infrastructure the national accounts information can be used to construct time series estimates for the infrastructure on a common sense view of its coverage in constant price terms the ratio of the infrastructure stock to gross value added appears to have risen since the mid 1990s back towards the levels of the 1970s but that is not true in current price terms where the ratio remains well below the levels of the 1970s the explanation seems to be that a relative price effect has occurred infrastructure has become cheaper in relative terms but that has not resulted in increased infrastructure intensity the article notes other information about the state of the uk infrastructure as they mature the whole of government accounts should be a rich source of information so too might the uk capital services index ultimately all this information could feed into a more systematic growth accounting framework for the uk

valuing the invaluable how much is the planet worth this article explores the valuation of natural capital by critically analysing alternative approaches to it it considers the problems associated with applying economic values to natural capital and the limitations of such exercises it examines different methods that are more familiar to accountants than economists of using what is sometimes termed an engineering approach to estimating the costs of maintaining and restoring existing assets it considers the arguments that are used to justify the two in particular it addresses the question of what we are seeking to do by determining the value of natural capital what is the question to which valuation is supposed to be the answer

natural capital assets systems and policies natural capital is a concept whose time has come but is in danger of being greenwashed to suit vested interests as has happened to sustainability it is a hard concept based upon assets rather than utility natural capital assets provide the foundations for positive freedom by providing for future generations capabilities and choices this is especially the case for renewable natural capital which can provide nature s bounty forever provided the assets are not driven below critical thresholds natural capital assets lend themselves to accounting to balance sheets and risk registers and require capital maintenance cost benefit analysis being partial and on a project by project basis has a limited role since the natural environment comes in systems and is less amenable to marginal analysis three principles are core to the design of natural capital policies these are public goods with public monies polluter pays and compensation in the form of net environmental gain

welfare and the family the canadian experience canada has a universal social assistance program that is almost completely administered through the federal canada assistance program however provinces determine the levels of assistance for various groups eligible for welfare this article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation single parenthood births out of wedlock divorce and labor force participation among low income women in canada it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions

consumption of spanish households evidence from cohort data in this paper empirical evidence on elasticity of intertemporal substitution for spanish household consumption is shown several recent studies have rejected the lifecycle permanent income hypothesis using aggregate time series the rejection of the theory has often been blamed on the restrictive assumptions adopted in order to test the hypothesis this article tests the household behaviour using cohort data from the spanish encuesta continua de presupuestos familiares continuous survey of household budgets this source allows us to relax some of the most restrictive assumptions by using data with a certain degree of disaggregation evidence of consumer behaviour following the theory is found indirect evidence of liquidity constraints is also found and an alternative discount rate designed to be in better accordance with the theoretical foundations of the model is proposed

tightening a welfare system the effects of benefit denial on future welfare receipt abstract we derive local average treatment effect estimates of the impact of welfare benefit denial on future receipt using a unique experiment involving reassessment of some applicants who were originally slated to receive benefits we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity among applicants our results support a model with a peripheral group who exhibit scarring effects from being granted benefits and a core group who do not the core group moves quickly back onto welfare when they are denied benefits even for the peripheral group benefit denial has intermediate term but not permanent impacts

further evidence of excess sensitivity of consumption nonseparability among goods and heterogeneity across households the standard theoretical framework for analysing households intertemporal decisions is the life cycle permanent income model among its implications testing the model allows to analyse the response of consumption to fiscal policy however the empirical literature with microdata has yielded mixed results this article examines the sensitivity of the results to the assumption of separability among goods and of homogeneity across households for that purpose we test a rational expectations permanent income model with household data drawn from the spanish family expenditure survey this survey contains detailed information on total expenditure and the income presents large exogenous quarterly changes due to an institutional feature the article shows that assuming separability among commodities biases the test against the model when separability is not imposed we show that the rejection of the model depends on heterogeneity across households in terms of their members being unemployed or not for those

why did the welfare rolls fall during the 1990 s the importance of entry during the late 1990 s the welfare caseload fell precipitously whereas 5 million families received cash welfare in 1994 only 2 1 million families received aid in 2000 as a fraction of the u s population this represents the lowest level of welfare receipt since 1964 u s department of health and human services 2002 the decline in the caseload could have resulted from a decrease in entries an increase in exits or some combination of the two although a number of studies have analyzed welfare exits either implicitly or explicitly few have focused on welfare entries entries may be important for a number of reasons conservative proponents of welfare reform explicitly sought to reduce welfare entries particularly entries related to unwed childbearing see r kent weaver 2000 ch 6 such observers might question the success of welfare reform if the decline in the caseload resulted entirely from increased exits entry effects may also have implications for the provision of in kind transfers historically both food stamps and medicaid were closely

corporate natural capital accounting accounting is an important practical mechanism by which corporations are held to account for their performance and impact this is consequential for corporate responsibility for the conservation of natural capital while there is clear evidence of increasing corporate accounting and reporting with respect to aspects of natural capital however such efforts are at best nascent this is in part because the purpose and meaning of corporate natural capital accounting is not in itself well established and in part because existing institutional structures and incentives do not lend themselves to giving a full account of natural capital impact in this context the paper argues that there is essentially a need for natural capital accounting and reporting systems that serve two distinct purposes the first which is the more likely to be satisfied by existing market structures is oriented towards the informational needs of shareholders and is concerned with supporting a transition towards environmentally sustainable business models the second in contrast acknowledges that a shareholder oriented perspective constrains natural capital to be important if and only if its conservation privately affects shareholders which is unlikely to ensure an accounting that contributes to the conservation of natural capital as an end in itself this second purpose of strengthening corporate natural capital accountability is unlikely to be satisfied within existing market structures instead it stands in need of a regulatory solution

the integration of child tax credits and welfare evidence from the national child benefit program abstract in 1998 the canadian government introduced a new child tax credit the innovation in the program was its integration with social assistance welfare some provinces agreed to subtract the new federally paid benefits from provincially paid social assistance partially lowering the welfare wall other provinces did not integrate benefits providing a quasi experimental framework for estimation we find large changes in social assistance take up and employment in provinces that provided the labour market incentives to do so in our sample the integration of benefits can account for between 19 and 27 of the decline in social assistance receipt between 1997 and 2000

the cost of energy review and its implementation the cost of energy review recommended that in the face of radical technical change government should move towards an equivalent firm power capacity auction integrating the renewables establish independent public system operators at the national and regional levels and move towards an economy wide carbon price these have met resistance from vested interests in defence of the economic rents that have accumulated from the dense web of interventions that have accumulated the paper shows that the first two of these reforms are nevertheless inevitable with active demand storage and decentralized generation technologies inverting the old assumptions of passive demand no storage and ever larger scale generation that have underpinned the electricity industry for the past century delay in implementation means continued excess costs of energy and delays innovation

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change how much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming the stern review argues that the damages from climate change are large and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions an examination of the review s radical revision of the economics of climate change finds however that it depends decisively on the assumption of a near zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function the review s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today s marketplace real interest rates and savings rates

who was affected by new welfare reform strategies microdata estimates from canada abstracta heterogeneous mix of aggressive welfare reforms took effect in different provinces and years starting in the 1990s welfare participation rates subsequently declined previous investigations of these declines focused on cuts in benefits and stricter eligibility requirements this article focuses instead on work requirements diversion earning exemptions and time limits referred to jointly as new welfare reform strategies while controlling for benefit levels eligibility requirements province specific labour market conditions and gdp growth as well as individual level socio economic information province year specific variation in new reform strategies produce estimates implying that their presence is associated with a large decline in welfare participation of 1 3 percentage points 14 relative to the unconditional mean participation rate of 9 2 our coding scheme generates new measures of policy variation that distinguish reductions in benefit levels and tighter eligibility restriction

choices and the value of natural capital sustainability requires maintaining opportunities for future generations so they can meet their needs opportunities are passed to future generations through a set of capital assets nature provides an important class of these assets but markets seldom reveal the marginal value of natural capital rather the marginal social worth or asset price must be imputed based on intertemporal exchange in the context of assessing whether intertemporal allocation rules lead to sustainable development appropriate asset prices must be based on the actual allocations and trade offs society makes therefore measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of asset prices is an important empirical task we review the theory of measuring natural capital asset prices and discuss the key elements of measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of natural capital asset prices we place the measurement of economic programmes and natural capital asset prices in the context of wealth based sustainability metrics