Accounting Price of an Exhaustible Resource: A Comment

Abstract

In Sec. 5 of a paper titled "Wealth Accounting, Exhaustible Resources and Social Welfare", Hamilton and Ruta (2009) derived accounting price for an exhaustible resource in Eq. (18), in the case of the so-called "El Serafy economy" (El Serafy 1989). However, the result is not plausible since they improperly replace constant extraction in the value of the resource stock (Eq. 17) with current resource stock divided by reserve life in their derivation. In the comment, I show the accounting price for the resource is the "user cost" defined by El Serafy (1989). This is an example of the consistency between the two approaches to valuing sectoral net investments compared by Wei (2013).

Keywords: Environmental accounting; Exhaustible resources; genuine saving; social welfare; Commodity flow approach

JEL Classification: Q01, Q03