Physical & Financial dimensions

Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) rely on legally enforceable property rights for asset recognition and valuation; or both P and Q in the rule Value (V) =P*Q. This serves fiduciary and practical purposes but property rights vary by Where and When measured. GAAP valued few 'intangibles' until recently; it still takes such a quaint view of society's productive base that businesses use other metrics to estimate Return on Investment (RoI) for M&A (mergers & acquisitions, summarized here, for example). M&A may recognize non-GAAP assets, say adding a Q for organizational capital; and attach some P; typically booked as "Goodwill" in GAAP. It may change P of a Q in GAAP, say revaluing a public producer's Property Assets (PA) from historical cost to something like market prices.

Wealth metrics does something similar to capitalize places. It recognizes assets by streams of services (and disservices) that may or may not be recognized in a local GAAP. M-LA treats this as a local GAAP setting P=0 for some assets. It therefore has two P-tiers: GAAP and Future. The Future tier seeks to assign relative P's to all streams of services, as they would be in the perfect world of economic theory. The gap between the two P-tiers gauges local realities like imperfect markets and incomplete contracts. Economic convergence is supposed to diminish this matrix of local unrequited transfers but probabilities and speed of change depend on local knowledge of How & Why the transfers exist.