Hoang, Khanh
Description
This thesis addresses several fundamental measurement issues in valuing natural capital services for the explicit inclusion of natural resources in measures of productivity. By addressing these measurement issues, this thesis helps to reduce the indivisibility between the economy and natural capital, ensuring this connection of traditional measures of productivity are more prominently recognised. The thesis consists of two sections. The first section (Chapter 2) focuses on the effect of...[Show more] including subsoil assets in mining sector productivity estimates. Three different methods for estimating natural capital user cost values are considered. Productivity measures, which include the service flow of natural capital, require user cost values for natural capital to be the same as the current standard methodology for producing capital service aggregates (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2001). The results show that while the different methods yield different multifactor productivity (MFP) estimates, the most influential adjustment to traditional productivity measures is the inclusion of natural capital. This generated substantial productivity gains for the Australian mining sector, where natural capital added at least 1.0 percentage point growth to annual productivity from 1995-1996 to 2015-2016. The second section comprises Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. The focus here is on enhancing the agricultural sector's productivity estimates by accounting for changes in the quality of agricultural land. Chapter 3 utilises a novel Australian administrative dataset of land sales to construct constant-quality land-price indexes. This chapter considers four hedonic spatial pricing models for valuing agricultural land, and two different approaches to creating constant-quality price indexes. Chapter 4 provides adjusted productivity estimates of the agriculture sector. Accounting for the quality of agricultural land reduces annual productivity growth by 1.3 percentage points each year between 1995-1996 and 2017-2018. The connecting link between all the chapters is that they were motivated by the need to enhance productivity estimates through the explicit inclusion of natural capital. The results from this thesis inform trade-offs of natural resources against environmental effects, and that, in turn, support sustainable development that fully considers intergenerational equity and income distribution resulting from the use of natural capital.
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