The unique selling point of Sixto Roxas's social accounting matrix is its generous flexibility. "First and foremost," says Roxas, "the social accounting matrix provides a precise description of the ecological and economic circumstances of the community." Thus, apart from its function as a constantly upgraded community financial ledger, it can be used to assess the intensity of resource use within a particular community, where the intensity is measured by the total number of transactions between different production sectors in the village. Normally, the social accounting matrix has 5 categories of accounting units: activities or commodities (agriculture, industry, services); factors of production (labour, capital, land, water); organisations (households, firms, government); capital account; and the rest of the avaricious world.

Community accounting would, by necessity, be isolationist, in that the community would seek to be as self-sufficient as possible. Since the basic unit of accounting is the community and the stakeholders are residents of the community, all income generated within its territorial boundaries is divided into 2 broad categories: income accruing to residents and income accruing to non-residents. Non-residents can be households, firms, the government and the external sector. Further, the ownership of assets in the community by non-residents is treated as a liability. This bit of Roxas's grand design helps to identify economic activities and development projects that will directly increase the income of the residents of the community rather than leak out of the local economy in the form of land rent or interest to non-resident asset holders.

But leak it will. Specifically, whenever a "development" project appropriates more of the community's resources than it returns to the community in the form of an increased flow of wages and rent, or depletes the natural resource base, the community accounting system rolls over and almost dies: the accounting system records a decrease in the community's net worth. From the perspective of the community under siege, it's a rotten deal any way you look at it.

The only way to circumvent this problem is for people to wrench control of their natural resources. Roxas believes that control does not necessarily mean ownership. The state can own the resource, provided that the state leave management decisions to the community. In India, however, state ownership brings with it political interference and bitter quarrels for control -- which is why it is necessary, at least in this case, to give the community ownership of the resource.