There is a significant gap between the system of national
accounts regulation (e.g. ESA in the EU) and the current
application of its related Economic Accounts for Agriculture
and Forestry (e.g. EAA/EAF in the EU). The EAA/
EAF significantly undervalues private dehesa income and
they do not include the private amenities consumed by the
landowner and the capital gains on the land. EAA/EAF
aim to measure the nation’s agroforestry net value
added (operating income) based mainly on commodities.
Therefore, missing private landowner amenities is, without
doubt, inconsistent with income theory, and in accordance
with today’s overarching ESA regulation, private amenity
must be an ESA output.
Since amenity self-consumption and the changes in asset
value are not included, the Eurostat EAA/EAF system
takes into account less than 51% of Haza’s private total
income at market prices. The relevance of the AAS
approach for estimating a theoretically sound figure for
private total income (Hicksian income) is twofold. First,
the operative AAS applied to Haza illustrates the potential
benefits of improving the shortcomings of the EAA/EAF,
whose omission of IOs renders the measure of any
agroforestry single activity income impossible. Second,
AAS allows for a homogeneous aggregation of private
operating income from market benefits and un-priced
services (amenity self-consumption), and from private
income derived from changes in human-made and natural
asset value (capital gains). Nevertheless, an estimated flow
value of private amenities shows that even recent green
accounting developments fail to incorporate amenity selfconsumption
(Eurostat, 2002; United Nations European
et al., 2003). The AAS proposes including this private
amenity value but acknowledges that to measure an
accurate flow value is time-consuming. However, it also
highlights that further research on temperate agroforestry
systems in developed countries must include private
amenity income in order to account for actual land prices
and private capital income, where there are no other nonagroforestry
potential uses that could affect the land
market price.