There is widespread recognition that we need to revise our methods of measuring national income to incorporate better the impact of economic activity on environmental assets. Our aim here is to investigate alternative concepts of national income in a dynamic economy, one a generalization of Hicksian income and the other a generalization of the welfare economics concept of income as the value of output at equilibrium prices. A first order approximation to changes in the Hamiltonian is a Hicksian measure of national income, equal in value to the real return available on the economy's stocks. National wealth is the present value of consumption over time, valued at supporting prices. If a consumption path changes slightly, then the change in Hicksian income is the change in wealth times the discount rate.
Wealth equals the present value of income minus the present value of changes in stocks.
It also works for non-utilitarian objectives such as overtaking, the Chichilnisky criterion and the green golden rule, where as the income measure does not.