Changes in the Distribution of Migrant Labourers and Implications of Comprehensive Wealth in China’s Urbanisation

This study applies the comprehensive wealth framework (CWF) to more fully assess the regional impacts of changes in the distribution of migrant workers in the recent urbanisation of China. The analysis indicates that changes in the distribution of migrant labourers have contributed to sustaining or increasing GDP growth rates and the level of human capital in both central and western regions. However, there is evidence that social and political capital may have declined along with the inflow of the mobile labour force and some lowered local government investments. From the perspective of the CWF, this study concludes that the impacts of distributional changes on regional comprehensive wealth is uncertain, potentially reducing the comprehensive wealth of the region.

Inclusive wealth with total factor productivity: global sustainability measurement

Non-technical abstract Wealth commonly refers to the measure of the value of all assets or capital owned by an individual, community, company or nation. Sustainable development requires that the per capita productive base or comprehensive wealth of an economy should at least not decline over a period of time. We present here a comprehensive assessment of cross-country productivity over a study period of 1990–2010 for 140 countries. We used the concept of inclusive wealth introduced by the United Nations to assess the social value, rather than dollar price, of all each country's assets, including produced, human and natural capital.

Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long-Run: Lessons from Germany

We construct long-run sustainability indicators based on changes in Comprehensive Wealth - which we refer to as Genuine Savings (GS) - for Germany over the period 1850-2000. We find that German sustainability indicators are positive for the most part, although they are negative during and after the two World Wars and also the Great Depression. We also test the relationship between these wealth changes and a number of measures of well-being over the long-run: changes in consumption as well as changes in average height and infant mortality rates. We find a positive relationship between GS and our well-being indicators over different time horizons, however, the relationship breaks down during WWII. We also test if the GS/Comprehensive Wealth framework is able to cope with massive disinvestment at the end of the Second World War due to war-related destructions and dismantlement. We find that negative rates of GS were by and large avoided due to the accumulation of technology and growth-friendly institutions. We demonstrate the importance of broader measures of capital, including measures of technological progress, and its role in the process of economic development; and the limits of conventional measures of investment to understand why future German consumption did not collapse.

Historical Wealth Accounts for Britain

Estimates of Britain’s comprehensive wealth are reported for the period 1760–2000. They include measures of produced, natural, and human capital, and illustrate the changing composition of Britain’s assets over this time period. This chapter shows how genuine savings (GS—a year-on-year measure of the change in total capital and a claimed indicator of sustainable development) has evolved over time. Changes in total wealth are compared to alternative, investment-based measures of GS, including variants augmented with the value of exogenous technology. In addition, the possible effects of population change on wealth, and the implications of including carbon dioxide emissions in natural capital, are considered.

Comprehensive wealth measurement and spatial hedonic analysis : social capital and social amenities

The last decade has seen a growing interest in the concept of comprehensive wealth, which is defined as including intangible and non-market as well as tangible and market assets. This dissertation responds to this rising interest by developing explicit concepts, indicators, and sources of data necessary to measure comprehensive wealth at various spatial scales. It achieves this by generalizing the general spatial equilibrium model proposed by Roback (1982). The key contributions of this research are the extension and application of the comprehensive wealth concept to measure the value of social amenities generated as a result of public and private investments in social and other types of capital. This dissertation extends the Roback model by identifying appropriate data on local income, land values, and place-based amenities at the county level in the contiguous 48 states of the United States. This dissertation reports substantial findings based on the empirical analysis. While the results are largely consistent with those of Roback and other, more recent papers and with theoretical expectations, this study found significantly different effects of amenities on wages and land values between metro and non-metro counties due to different marginal effects on wages and land values. The analysis also found significant spatial interaction effects, which influence the magnitude of the full implicit price for social amenity variables, again with significant differences between metro and non-metro counties. Finally, the extended model is able to determine whether the social amenities are at optimal levels. There are important implications of this research. Policies to enhance social amenities from immobile social capital and local public services can reduce both real costs of production and the societal opportunity costs of development in the long term. Well-designed policy and investment in immobile and non-marketed amenities of a location will make a place more attractive and sustainable, conferring benefits to residents and local businesses. The proposed typology can be useful for designing policy and investment plans for sustainable regional economic development. The model can also be used to conduct simulations to predict the effects of policy on comprehensive wealth given locally unique and dynamic combinations of regional assets. Keywords: Comprehensive Wealth; Spatial Equilibrium Model; Non-market Valuation; Social Amenities; Social Capital