New Developments in Environmental Accounting at Istat
01.01.2000
Angelica Tudini, Federico Falcitelli, Cesare Costantino
Q2,Q3,O47
Environmental accounting,environmental protection expenditure,integrated environmental accounts
Climate Change and Sustainable Development
Carlo Carraro
Three projects undertaken by the Istat Environmental Accounting Unit are close to the stage of regular data production. They are: the collection of data on environmental protection expenditure (EPE), respectively by General Government and by Industry and Services, and the production of an Italian NAMEA (National Accounts Matrix Including Environmental Accounts). The paper describes, for each of them, the methodology used and the progress made so far. Both the project on EPE incurred by General Government and the one on companies’ EPE – aim at producing basic data for the construction of the satellite Environmental Protection Expenditure Account (EPEA), in application of the European guidelines on implementation of the SERIEE system of satellite accounts. As regards General Government, the method chosen at Istat for collecting and quantifying expenditure on environmental protection is budget analysis; specific ways to counteract the drawbacks of this method are applied. The collection of data on companies’ EPE is pursued by means of direct survey; the first survey was conducted within the 1999 Intermediate Census of Industry and Services. Finally, the third project produced in 1999 the first Italian NAMEA, for the year 1990; it includes: in the economic module, the goods and service account and the production account; in the environmental module, emissions of six air pollutants by 52 economic activities and households’ consumption, and the direct intake of 4 resources from nature by economic activity.