Buy me a river

By The Economist online

A new index attempts to take stock of countries' total wealth

THE world is seemingly fixated on short-term economic flows: GDP, industrial production, consumer spending and so forth. But the stocks of capital that underlie these metrics have hitherto escaped capture by the world's statisticians. To mark the Rio+20 conference, the UN has attempted to address this shortfall with the "Inclusive Wealth Index", a comprehensive look at a country's wealth that takes things like forests and rivers into account. Comprised of human, natural and produced capital, the index covers 20 countries between 1990 and 2008. Between them they account for 58% of the world's population and 73% of its GDP. As GDP does not consider natural-resource depletion or environmental degradation, the UN's index records lower annual average growth in wealth compared with GDP, of 1.7 percentage points.