Alternative national accounting: From monetary to social cost accounting

Berger, Sebastian; Richard, Jacques

Abstract

Today the world is facing multiple social and ecological crises, which cause human suffering that could be avoided through changes in accounting systems. Firstly, the accounting of large international firms and its concomitant national growth accounts are responsible for these crises because they either do not account for the social costs of production correctly or not at all. Secondly, the shortcomings of these monetary accounting systems, that is, their formal rationality, have to be remedied through a substantive rationality that aims at sustainable social provisioning based on full real cost accounting. These calculations in kind are rooted in scientific knowledge regarding conditions for sustainable satisfaction of objective human needs within specific social and natural environments. In this article we synthesize insights from critical accounting science (Richard 2021) and economics(Berger 2017) for a humanitarian and socio-ecological accounting at the national and firm level.

• Digital Artefact Type: Website Content
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: May 5, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 15, 2021
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7338217