ABSTRACT
GDP is blamed for distorting the assessment of socioeconomic progress. GDP bashing ignores, though, that the national accounts provide the only well-defined objective measures of economic performance, an essential ingredient of national progress. This is not to deny that a number of environmental and social obstacles might lie in the way of progress. The greening of the national accounts, as suggested by the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, corrects the accounting indicators for hitherto ignored environmental costs. Internalizing these costs into the budgets of households and enterprises and into environmental-economic policies would ground the integration of environmental and economic policies on facts rather than rhetoric.
