지은이: William D. Nordhaus, February 6, 2004
※ 발췌:
(...)
Adjustments, additions, and subtractions that would be necessary to include non-market activities The next issue concerns the appropriate treatment of non-market activities. It should be noted that the accounts already include a substantial value of such activities, including owner-occupied housing and food consumed on farms. A natural principle for treating non-market activity is the following:
Basic principle for measuring non-market activity. Non-market goods and services should be treated as if they were produced and consumed as market activities. Under this convention, the prices of non-market goods and services should be imputed on the basis of the comparable market goods and services.
For example, if households gather 10 pints of berries in the national forests, then the price attributed to that activity should be the price of berries of equivalent quality in that location. There may be formidable practical issues in implementing this fundamental principle, but the underlying logic is clear.
Near-market goods and services
One important distinction in this regard is whether or not goods and services are “near-market.” A near-market good or service is one that has a direct counterpart in the market (firewood, berries, owner-occupied housing, and homegrown tomatoes). Near-market goods and services obey the “third party rule,” which states that a third party could produce the good or service just as well as the party that consumes the item.
Personal goods and services
The complementary case has no name but might be called personal goods and services, indicating that these items can only be produced by the consumer. Personal goods and services do not obey the “third party rule.” Their prices cannot be observed because no transactions occur in markets, although behavioral traces of the valuation of personal goods can be found in household decisions. The clearest example of a personal commodity is leisure time; no one can produce leisure for me. There are no market transactions for personal goods and services, and we must rely upon imputed or implicit prices. For the case of leisure, we normally impute the value by assuming that individuals optimize their time use, which ordinarily implies that the value of leisure is the individual’s aftertax marginal wage rate. (I return to this issue below.)
There are no major conceptual differences between near-market and personal goods. Rather, the implication of this distinction is the practical one that estimation of the value of personal non-market goods may be extremely difficult because there are no transactions and no market standards.
Public v. private goods
The other important distinction that will require analysis in an accounting context is between private and public goods and services (in the Samuelsonian sense). Private goods and services are ones that can be divided up and provided separately to different individuals, with no external benefits or costs to others. An example is bread. Ten loaves of bread can be divided up in many ways among individuals, and what one person eats cannot be eaten by others. Private goods are straightforward for economic accounting and are central to the theory behind the NEA. There are no conceptual changes that are necessary to include non-market private goods (either near-market or personal).
Public goods and services, by contrast, are ones whose benefits are indivisibly spread among the entire community, whether or not individuals desire to purchase them. An example is smallpox eradication. It matters not at all whether one is old or young, rich or poor, American scientist or African farmer -- one will benefit from the eradication whether one wants to or not. A major issue for non-market accounts, particularly environmental accounts, is the treatment of public goods (or goods with externalities). This is one area where I would suggest a revision in the treatment under standard national accounting. It should be noted that public goods are already in the accounts, but there a conceptual difficulties that arise in their treatment in a complete set of accounts. There are two interesting cases: Case 1, public goods where the flows are completely in the market
accounts; and Case 2, public goods where some of the flows are in the nonmarket sectors. (...)
지은이: Joel Darmstadter. 아래 발췌문의 지은이(William D. Nordhaus)
(...) The traditional national accounts primarily include the final output of marketed goods and services—namely, goods and services that are bought and sold in market transactions. Notwithstanding the importance of the traditional accounts, it has long been recognized that limiting them to market transactions distorts the accounts as a measure of economic activity and well-being. There is a vast and rapidly evolving array of near-market goods and services—ones that are similar to marketed goods but that are omitted from traditional accounts. This boundary distorts our measures of economic activity. Services provided by nannies are reckoned as part of the gross domestic product, while the services of mommies and daddies are not; the value of swimming in a commercial swimming pool is captured by GDP, while the value of swimming in the Atlantic Ocean is not.
(...) After a thorough review, the NRC committee urged the adoption of an ambitious program for developing a comprehensive set of near-market and nonmarket accounts. In addition to developing environmental and natural resource accounts, significant extensions would include the value of: home production and unpaid work, research and development capital, nonmarket time of the population, and informal and home education. In a wealthy country like the United States, providing information on the structure and interactions of the economy and the environment is an essential function of government. It deserves a serious research effort by the federal government and private research organizations.
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