Constructing an open access economy-wide database for bioeconomy impact assessment in the European Union member states

Abstract

The bioeconomy encompasses the extraction, processing and transformation of renewable biological resources and waste streams, connected to activities as diverse as food, feed, energy and manufacturing. Under the auspices of the European Union’s ‘Green Deal’ strategy, this broad collective of sectors is promoted as a cornerstone for achieving sustainable growth. Progress in developing ex-ante tools of economy-wide modelling analysis to assess its performance is, however, hindered by a paucity of consistent and comprehensive data. To overcome this shortcoming, the construction steps for a new set of open access social accounting matrices (dubbed ‘BioSAMs’) is described for a detailed and comprehensive selection of traditional and contemporary bio-based accounts for each of the EU member states. To illustrate its potential, a structural analysis based on three different and complementary methods (Rasmussen-Jones, hypothetical extraction method and eigenvector) is performed to classify bio-based sector wealth generating properties and to identify high performance (‘key’) sectors.