Diego Herrera Garcia: The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021: Managing Assets for the Future

What is the best way to assess a nation’s prosperity and sustainability? Growing concerns about climate change, rising inequality, unsustainable resource use, and destruction of nature highlight the need for new economic tools to ensure development is sustainable, resilient, and inclusive. Gross domestic product (GDP), the conventional measure of economic progress, overlooks many vital aspects of nature, sustainability and human development. Wealth accounting offers a powerful way to look ‘beyond GDP’ for a more comprehensive view of the sustainability of growth. The World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 report provides a rich analysis and database of the world’s wealth accounts spanning 146 countries from 1995 to 2018. It contains the widest set of assets covered so far in the series of the report, including the value of human capital, as well as many different forms of natural capital, including forests, cropland, mangroves, marine fisheries minerals, and fossil fuels. In this presentation Diego Herrera will discuss how wealth accounting can improve our understanding of economic sustainability and serve as a way for countries to move ‘beyond GDP’.
Diego Herrera is an Environmental Economist at the World Bank’s Environment, Natural Resources, and Blue Economy Global Practice. Diego’s research addresses the interactions between forest conservation and development policies. At the World Bank he is supporting global and country-level efforts to value natural assets and develop wealth accounts. Before joining the World Bank, Diego was an Economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, where he helped design economic and financial instruments for the protection of tropical forests and coastal ecosystems, and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Gund Institute for Environment where he modeled the human health impacts of forest and watershed conservation in low- and middle income countries. Diego holds a PhD in environmental economics and policy from Duke University and a BSc in Economics from Universidad de Costa Rica.
To learn about Gund: www.uvm.edu/gund