Revue des sciences politiques et des affaires publiques
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Abstrait

Public Goods, Sustainable Development and Business Accountability: Connecting Corporate Performance and Preservation of the Commons

Bardy R

Sustainable Development is about preserving and maintaining public goods. This comes out both from the intraand intergenerational aspect of the Brundtland definition (“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”; World Commission on Environment and Development). In consequence, whoever uses public goods is liable for their preservation, for their maintenance and, where they are underdeveloped, for their built-up and expansion. “Paying” for the usage of public goods is taken care of by taxes and excise, and, more recently, by duties like those levied on emission. However, the magnitude of public goods usage is rarely measured on either national or regional or local levels (The phenomenon of global public goods is only briefly mentioned in the paper as it mainly studies the “macro-micro- linkage” between a national economy and business), let alone in monetary terms. Yet monetary valuation is the language of business, and when statistical indicators are set up to measure progress of sustainable development, there are almost none that link the macro-sphere to the business level. While the objective of national accounts is to serve for decision-making by government authorities in the first place, businesses and individuals do as well base their decisions on information gleaned from national accounts. Businesses are often reproached for using public goods for free. Therefore they might want to demonstrate that they earn a return on the capital invested in public goods they use; they might be interested to know the value of those goods, and they would wish to show that the taxes they pay are at least on par with the “return” on what is invested in public goods. The paper shows how this could be achieved, exhibiting the theoretical and practical issues and pointing to the obstacles that are blocking a fast solution.