Sustainability of comprehensive wealth: A practical and normative assessment

My dissertation presents, expands, and critiques the genuine saving (GS) framework for measuring sustainability. The GS framework relates human welfare to a society's stock of capital assets, including manufactured, human, and natural capital. The value of all these forms of capital is our comprehensive wealth, and the change in comprehensive wealth is genuine savings. A central tenet of the GS approach is that sustainability---here defined as maintaining human welfare---requires that genuine savings remain positive.; In this dissertation I describe the theoretical roots of GS and highlight its advantages and limitations. GS enables current generations to monitor the moral injunction to leave future generations enough capital to be as well off as we are today. In terms of monitoring the broad array of capital that humans need to generate welfare, GS is an improvement over other macroeconomic indicators that ignore the environment. That said, GS is based on a controversial weak sustainability paradigm that allows exchange between capital forms. In my dissertation, I explore the assumptions of this paradigm.; My dissertation constitutes an expansion and improvement of GS' empirical application. Previous empirical applications of GS have underrepresented natural capital, especially nature's goods and services that are not bought and sold on a market. I build a new model to include the non-timber benefits derived from forests and apply it to Brazil. I establish the importance of the accounting's omission of air, water, and land degradation from United States agricultural production. I also alter the method of accounting for climate change to ensure that it better maps to physical reality.; My work has demonstrated that even with the most recent valuation techniques, substantial uncertainties surround important variables employed in GS applications. However, there is no single alternative macroeconomic indicator that can compete with GS for integrated coverage across forms of capital. In the conclusion to this dissertation, I suggest possible ways recognize and report on both quantifiable and fundamental uncertainty in GS. Therefore, I conclude that GS remains an important approach as long as we deal responsibly with its uncertainty.