That the pressures for development may cause long-term damage to the environment and the natural resource base has became of increasing concern to environmentalists and economists alike. A great deal of work is now being done to clarify the linkages between development and the environment. Such work should make it possible to integrate concerns about environmental and natural resource management more effectively into the process of economic analysis and decision making. An important problem has been that current calculations of gross domestic product (GDP), the most commonly used indicator of national economic performance, ignore the degradation of the natural resource base and view the sale of nonrenewable resources entirely as income. The papers in this volume were selected from a series of international conferences jointly organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank during the past six years.

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