In national balance sheets economists seldom use full-cost accounting, which includes the loss of natural resources. A country can cut down all its trees, mine out its most profitable minerals, exhaust its fisheries, erode most of its soil, draw down its underground water, and count all the proceeds as income and none of the depletion as cost. It can pollute the environment and promote policies that crowd its populace into urban slums, without charging the result to overhead.
