Environmental Input-Output Tables
Researchers: Dr Andrea Collins, Dr Andrew Flynn, Calvin Jones (WERU), Dr Max Munday and Dr Annette Roberts
Background
Input-Output tables provide a financial picture of an economy, showing domestic and international trade flows between different industries, consumers and government sectors during a particular year. This accounting framework enables inter-industry transactions (sales and purchases) to be mapped and quantified, enabling detailed descriptions of economy interactions, whilst manipulation of these tables allows the effects of changes in that economy to be estimated, via calculation of economic multipliers.
The present phase of the Welsh I-O project, to further develop all Wales level tables, is being financed jointly by WDA and Cardiff Business School and involves the creation of a new sets of Input-Output tables for 2000 and 2003.
Regionally derived information on air and other emissions has recently become available, and this can be combined with information from the Welsh Input-Output tables to create an environmental module. The regionally derived information on emissions and natural resources can then be used in conjunction with the input-output framework to generate the direct and indirect volume of the given pollutant generated by changes in final demands in each industry. The significance of the input-output framework is that it allows, within the confines of the linear input-output framework, one industry’s production to be linked with another industry’s pollution creation.
Environmental extensions to basic input-output tables provide a statement of environmental account, allow investigation of trade-offs between selected environmental effects and industrial development, and could inform the production of economic, waste and natural resource strategies. The outputs of policy simulations using such methods could potentially be used as ‘inputs’ to predict possible wider outcomes on other sustainable indicators or tools, and to support planning and evaluation processes.
