Environmental Impacts of Capital Formation Södersten, Carl‐Johan; Wood, Richard; Hertwich, Edgar G.
Journal of industrial ecology,
February 2018, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Summary
The investment in capital goods is a well‐known driver of economic activity, associated resource use, and environmental impact. In national accounting, gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) ...constitutes a substantial share of the total final demand of goods and services, both in terms of monetary turnover and embodied resources. In this article, we study the structure of GFCF and the environmental impacts associated with it on a global scale, and link it to measures of development. We find that the share of GFCF as part of the total carbon footprint (CF) varies more across countries than GFCF as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). Countries in early phases of development generally tend to invest in resource‐intensive assets, primarily infrastructure and machinery, whereas wealthier countries invest in less resource‐intensive assets, such as computers, software, and services. By performing a structural decomposition analysis, we assess the relative importance of investment structure and input‐output multipliers for the difference in carbon intensity of capital assets, and find that the structure of investments plays a larger role for less‐developed countries than for developed countries. We find a relative decoupling of the CF of GFCF from GDP, but we can neither confirm nor rule out the possibility of an absolute decoupling.
Blue growth and ecosystem services Mulazzani, Luca; Malorgio, Giulio
Marine policy,
November 2017, 2017-11-00, Volume:
85
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The recent years have witnessed a rise in interest in the ocean economy. To cover a more sustainable dimension, terms such as ‘blue economy’ and ‘blue growth’ have been coined, and are increasingly ...used in international contexts and academic literature. However, there are no generally accepted definitions of these ‘blue’ concepts. In particular, it is not clear what connotation of sustainability and what role of natural environment is linked to these terms. The objective of this study is to retrace the meaning of the concepts of blue economy and blue growth and include them in a coherent environmental accounting framework. Starting from the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting of the United Nations, a set of assumptions is proposed to link blue economy/growth and ecosystem services, including the creation of an adjusted measure of value added, while considering the depletion and degradation of the environment and the value of non-market benefits provided by the ecosystem. Finally, an example of this approach in the case of the Mediterranean Sea is presented.
•Blue economy and blue growth concepts are used with inconsistent meanings.•This study links them coherently with sustainability and ecosystem services.•Blue economy meaning coincides nowadays with that of a ‘sustainable ocean economy’.•Sustainability must be considered in its weak interpretation.•Ecosystem services should be included in the accountability of a blue economy.
The most significant current technological trend is digitization, the impacts of which will be faced by all levels of society. This paper addresses how the Australian construction industry has kept ...up with the pace of digitization compared with other industries in Australia. The data is drawn mainly from the national accounts hosted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, within the time period of 1995–2015. Construction has developed into one of the most important industries in Australia. Together with mining and the financial and insurance sector, it has contributed to a significant gross added value (GVA) in the economy. The construction industry has invested around 1% or less in information and communication technologies (ICT) as their share of GVA; however, it has invested about 15% in ICT of their total investments (gross fixed capital formation). Among the selected industries, construction's labour productivity measured by GVA per hour was the third highest, despite low level of investments in digitization. The observed correlation between ICT investments and productivity is weak when using industry level data from the national accounts. Any big leap towards digitization is not recognised for the construction industry; rather there appears to be steady acceptance of the technology.
•This paper addresses how the Australian construction industry has kept up with the pace of digitalisation.•The construction industry has invested around 1% in ICT as their share of gross value added.•However, the construction industry has invested about 15% in ICT of their total investments (gross fixed capital formation).•Among the selected industries construction's labour productivity measured by GVA per hour was the third highest, despite low level of investments in digitalisation.•The observed correlation between ICT investments and productivity is weak when using the industry level data from the national accounts.•A big leap towards digitalisation is not observed for the construction industry, but a steady acceptance of the technology.
There has long been interest in integrating the value of environmental stocks and flows into standard measures of economic activity and wealth, in particular through the development of adjusted ...measures of GDP and extended measures of national wealth. This paper examines how the valuation of ecosystem services and ecosystem assets can be undertaken in an integrated national accounting setting. We clarify the relevant valuation principles, most significantly the need to apply the concept of exchange values, and explain why the integration of ecosystem services necessitates an extension of the standard production boundary used in economic measurement. The main implications of an accounting approach are discussed including the need to distinguish benefits from services, the need for valuation methods that exclude consumer surplus, and the importance of aligning measures of income and degradation. Remaining challenges include the treatment of low or negative rents, accounting for ecosystem disservices, and the derivation of values for ecosystem assets. Meeting these challenges and advancing work in this area should be the joint focus of economists, ecologists and accountants.
The United Nations monetary System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) does not recommend the measurement of the environmental incomes of single products from an ...ecosystem accounting area. The objective of this paper is to uncover the accounting period environmental income given by the environmental operating return embedded in single biological-based products consumed, plus their environmental asset gain, by applying the authors' refined extended monetary accounts of the SEEA EA. The standard System of National Accounts (SNA) and the refined SEEA EA frameworks are applied to 12 protected publicly-owned mixed-pine-forest-farm case studies in Andalusia, Spain. The comparison of results shows that the net value added for the pine-forest farms estimated under the refined SEEA EA is four times greater than that of the standard SNA, indicating the importance of uncovering the exchange values provided by the operating returns on manufactured capitals and environmental assets of products consumed without market prices. After omitting the carbon ecosystem service to avoid double counting, the ecosystem services and changes in the environmental assets made up 68% and 32%, respectively, of the aggregate environmental income from the 11 environmental assets valued in the pine-forest-farm case studies in 2010.
•The refined SEEA EA extends the SNA by incorporating the environmental income.•The refined SEEA EA net value added is 4.4 times higher than under the SNA.•Public activities account for 89% of net value added under the refined SEEA EA.•Ecosystem services account for 95% of conifer farm environmental income.•Farmer provisioning services account for 2% of conifer farm ecosystem services.
Decomposition analysis can provide a useful efficiency metric for the industrial sector, it does so by separating the influence of changes in energy intensity from structural and activity changes. ...The activity refactorisation (AR) approach to decomposition analysis offers a potentially improved methodology, with a better correlation to real efficiency improvements. This is achieved through combining monetary and physical output data. Here the AR approach is compared to other methodologies for the United Kingdom industrial sector over the period 1997–2012. Even with limited availability of physical output data the AR approach was found to provide significantly different results to those obtained using only monetary output measures. When monetary output was the sole measure of activity, intensity (efficiency) improvements were overestimated. It is recommended that physical output data is supplied alongside energy demand and monetary output data in national accounts to better track efficiency improvements and allow such improved metrics to feed into decarbonisation policy discussions.
•Decomposition analysis is applied to provide an industrial energy efficiency metric.•The activity refactorisation approach to decomposition analysis is explored.•Physical and monetary measures of output are combined in this approach.•Data availability can often be a barrier to this form of analysis.•Recommendations are made for improving national datasets to track efficiency.
Using all geo-located image tweets shared on Twitter in 2012–2013, I find that the volume of tweets is a valid proxy for estimating GDP at the country level, explaining 78 percent of cross-country ...variations. I also exploit the geographic granularity of social media posts to estimate and predict GDP at the sub-national level. I find that tweets alone can explain 52 percent of the variation in GDP across cities in the US. Estimates using Twitter data perform on par with the more common night-lights proxy. Furthermore, both indicators seem to capture different aspects of economic activity and thus complement each other.
•Article uses all geo-located image tweets shared in 2012–2013, and finds that the volume of tweets is a valid proxy for estimating current GDP in USD at the country level.•The goodness-of-fit of Twitter data as a proxy of economic activity is comparable to that of night-light data.•Given that these proxies capture different aspects of economic activity, they should be used together to increase predictive power.•I exploit the geographic granularity of tweets to estimate GDP at the sub-national level.•Twitter can be used to measure economic activity in a more timely and spatially disaggregate way than conventional data.
Economic inequalities have increased in many countries since the 1980s, provoking calls for more income redistribution. One argument against increased redistribution is that it could hamper ...innovation and technological progress. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that empirically investigates the relationship between government redistributive policies at the top of income distribution and innovative activity using new, high-quality, cross-country comparable panel data on income redistribution from the Distributional National Accounts. This study analyzes data from 34 advanced and emerging countries between 1980 and 2010. We find that redistribution has no negative impact on innovation in the cross-country setting. This result is robust to various measures of income redistribution and patent-based indicators of innovation, including patent counts, patent citations, and patent originality.
•We investigate the effect of income redistribution on countries' innovative activity.•The sample covers 34 advanced and emerging countries observed from 1980 to 2010.•We do not find any negative impacts of redistribution on patent-based innovation measures.•Results are robust to many sensitivity checks.•Results suggest that reducing inequality through redistribution does not hurt innovation.
PurposeBrazil’s regional inequality is an important topic due to the large and persistent differences in development between states and the high levels of inequality in the country. These variations ...in development can potentially render survey data inaccurate since the significance of capital income varies across the states. Besides, previous studies incorporating tax and national accounts data globally have mainly focused on measuring the income distribution at the country-level. This approach can limit the understanding of inequality, especially when considering large countries such as Brazil.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology used to construct these estimates follows the guidelines of the Distributional National Accounts, whose core goal is to provide income distribution measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates and harmonized across countries and time. The procedure has three main steps: first, it corrects the survey’s underrepresentation of top incomes using tax data. Then, it accounts for national income items not included in the survey or tax data, such as imputed rents and undistributed profits. Finally, it ensures that all components match the national income.FindingsCompared to survey-based estimations, the results reveal a new angle on the state-level inequality. This study indicates that Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have a more concentrated income distribution. The top 1\% of earners in these states receives around 28\% of total pre-tax income, while the top 10\% receive nearly 60\%. On the other end, Amapá (AP), Acre (AC), Rondônia (RO) and Santa Catarina (SC) are the states where the income distribution is less concentrated. There were no significant changes in the income distribution across the states during the period analyzed.Originality/valueThis study combines survey, tax and national accounts data to construct new estimates of Brazil’s state-level income distribution from 2006 to 2019. Previous results only considered income captured in surveys, which usually misses a significant part of capital incomes. This limitation may bias comparisons as capital income has different importance across the states. The new estimates represent the income of top groups more accurately, account for the entire national income and enable to compare regional inequality levels consistently with other countries.
La mesure du produit intérieur brut (PIB), principale représentation de l’économie nationale, est assurée en France par le département des comptes nationaux de l’Institut national de la statistique ...et des études économiques (INSEE) selon deux processus de calcul distincts. Loin de conclure le travail de chiffrage, ces calculs créent des problèmes : ils aboutissent à deux montants différents du PIB, et rendent incohérente la représentation de l’économie nationale. Pour retrouver une image cohérente, les comptables nationaux interviennent sur les nombres lors de ce qu’ils appellent l’arbitrage. À la croisée de la sociologie de la quantification et de la sociologie de l’activité, cet article porte sur les ressorts de l’arbitrage. Il interroge la forme singulière de travail qui permet de chiffrer l’économie nationale en dépit des problèmes occasionnés par les calculs. L’analyse se fonde sur une enquête ethnographique de neuf mois au sein du département des comptes. Elle montre que la mesure du PIB ne se résume jamais à un simple déploiement d’opérations mathématiques, mais passe par un travail interprétatif sur les nombres, en tant qu’ils sont porteurs d’énoncés économiques. C’est l’évaluation minutieuse et collective de la qualité des énoncés qui permet in fine de construire une représentation unique et quantifiée de l’économie nationale.
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