This paper describes various management tools and indicators for sustainable development and provides some lessons drawn from Norwegian experiences. It summarises experiences with natural resource accounting and the debate on how far one should go in synthesising and summarising the information contained in them into a single aggregate measure such as “Green GDP.” It also briefly describes Norway's efforts to establish a set of indicators on sustainable development.
The paper recommends that, regardless of the information collected and organised to support decision-making processes, the final outcome should always be judged in terms of its impacts on policy processes. Thus, the authors warn against large-scale development of information systems, without due regard to the final utilisation of the output.
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This publication gives an overview of Statistic Norway's work of compiling national statistics on natural resources and environmental issues, and developing methods and models for analysing trends in the extraction and use of natural resources and changes in the state of the environment. In particular, the study focuses on relationships between these factors and other socio-economic developments.
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