Forensic economics the way forward for sustainable development

to economic, social and environmental challenges, many governments agreed to pursue the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to save Earth.

The aim of the SDGs is to encourage corporations to pledge to help in the delivery of sustainable developmental goals.

One of the goals of the SDGs is to bring about international agreements on actions to protect the environment.

According to the National Association of Forensic Economics, forensic economics is a scientific discipline that applies economic theory and methods to issues within a legal framework.

However, forensic economics is not limited to the calculation of pecuniary damages in personal commercial litigation.

Some applications of forensic economics are the statistical analysis of discrimination, the analysis of market power in antitrust disputes and fraud detection.

Conceived as economics applied to legal matters, forensic economics is a broad field.

While some of its applications may fall under such a rubric — for example, anti-trust and public utility regulated rates — due to tradition, its purpose tends to be categorised under other fields in economics.

Forensic economics can be performed by regulators or other third parties.

In cases involving corruption and other wrongdoings, the focus of forensic economics is on conflict avoidance. In such cases, the role of forensic economics is to provide evidence of violations, and documents as evidence and for explanation.

Forensic investigation includes the analysis of evidence needed to convict or to exonerate people. Forensic economics contributes to the good of society in providing measures to meet the SDGs.

This is important considering that the 17 SDGs are a complex system that comprises 169 targets with 239 indicators.

The link between forensic economics and the SDGs illustrates and emphasises the integrated nature of the SDGs.

To apply forensic economics to the SDGs, the development of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) is required. The Department of Statistics Malaysia has taken steps to measure the effectiveness of environmental policies and programmes.

SEEA has two outputs:

map for SEEA Malaysia;

Water Account

A major development of SEEA is the production of the SEEA central framework, which describes the interactions between the economy and the environment.

A development plan for the SEEA account from 2016 to 2020 has been submitted to the United Nations Statistics Division and following that, the Report of MySEEA Physical Use Table-Energy has been completed by the Department of Statistics. This incorporates green economy indicators and the SDGs.

With SEEA integrated with the SDGs, we can determine industries that export products with high emission intensity in a country.