Wealth on a Country’s Balance Sheet

and other development needs. Not only could the ingrained income bias serve as an explanation for the lack of impact ESG investors seek, what is more troubling is that ESG investing may unintentionally harm sustainable development. Measuring a nation’s wealth more comprehensively is necessary to start overcoming these biases.

Access to capital markets plays an important role in countries’ development by providing an important channel of financing for the real economy, national infrastructure, and social and other needs. The ability of countries to raise funds on favorable terms depends on a number of factors, recently on the market participants’ application of sovereign ESG scores to assess the country’s long-term sustainability and creditworthiness (Gratcheva, Gurhy, Skarnulis, et al. 2021). Although the scores have been used predominately in the context of sovereign bonds, they are not tied to a specific instrument. Instead, sovereign ESG scores help inform a country’s overall risk and investment profile (Gratcheva, Gurhy, Emery, et al. 2021). The wealth accounting data serve as a valuable foundation on which these profiles can be formed, even for countries with less developed markets, thanks to their wide and consistent coverage of 146 countries.

Gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of economic well-being or living standards has long been criticized. As natural capital and ecosystem services have gained momentum in current policy discussions, the shortcomings of GDP have become more and more apparent. Not only is GDP inadequate for providing a complete picture of an economy’s situation and prospects (Coyle et al. 2019), it also does not reflect the depletion of subsoil assets, loss of species abundance, or agricultural damage resulting from extreme weather events. Furthermore, GDP does not account for positive environmental policies such as reforestation efforts, the adoption of organic agriculture, or preservation of biodiversity and endangered species.

Exploiting natural resources for short-term economic gains comes at the cost of long-term sustainable growth potential. Resource-dependent economies may experience short-term growth boosts by relying on natural resource rents. If these rents are not reinvested into other types of capital, the country’s economy may fall victim to the natural resource curse or the Dutch disease (Gylfason 2001; van der Ploeg 2011; Venables 2016). However, these long-term consequences remain unquantified, as decisionmakers lack an adequate monetary assessment of what is lost in terms of future rents. According to Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, “it’s like grading a corporation based on one day’s cash flow and forgetting to depreciate assets and other costs” (Stiglitz 2006). This calls for a measure of a country’s assets that not only takes stock of current agricultural land in square kilometers but also conveys the potential “lifetime earnings” of the land in dollar amounts.

Wealth accounting quantifies the lifetime earnings of a country’s assets in monetary terms. The wealth methodology provides a robust, quantitative framework for thinking about sustainability in terms of