What Money Cannot Buy: Disillusionment of the Apparent Link Between Environment and Narrow Economic Prosperity

Abstract

This paper briefly outlines the need for natural resource accounting (NRA) which will enable us to integrate the information on interactions between environment and economy. Role of NRA to monitor and help achieve the sustainable development goals as part of Agenda 2030 from the perspective of Indian economy is explored next. But, does economic prosperity necessarily ensure sustainable development? This is a pertinent question delved into using Spearman’s Rank Correlation, which yielded the finding that although there is a positive relation between GDP and sustainability, however, focusing merely on economic prosperity will not suffice. Special attention is imperative to achieve the goals set out for Agenda 2030, both on the regional as well as the national level.