A full accountability needs to extend beyond the company's own costs and revenues to capture impacts on the environment, for example through the developing - but still controversial - approaches of environmental impact assessment (EIA) and 'life cycle analysis' (. Milne, 1994). Clearly, in the present state of the art, any such accounting is fraught with theoretical and practical difficulties (. Cope and James, 1990), although pioneering attempts have been made (. in BSO/Origin's annual reports, illustrated at Macve and Carey, 1992, pp. 57-65). Various bodies (such as the United Nations and International Institute for Sustainable Development) have called for further research and experimentation with such.
