Socio-economic dimensions of the Bioeconomy – selected findings for trends in the recent past

Lara Ahmann (), Martin Distelkamp (), Christian Lutz () and Markus Flaute ()
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Lara Ahmann: GWS - Institute of Economic Structures Research
Martin Distelkamp: GWS - Institute of Economic Structures Research
Christian Lutz: GWS - Institute of Economic Structures Research
Markus Flaute: GWS - Institute of Economic Structures Research

No 19-2, GWS Discussion Paper Series from GWS - Institute of Economic Structures Research

Abstract: In this documentation, the socio-economic dimension of the German bioeconomy (BE) is reported for the recent past. The presented findings were developed as part of the project SYMOBIO (https://symobio.de/), a research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the concept of "Bioeconomy as Societal Change". The research consortium is working to create the scientific basis for monitoring the bioeconomy (BE) in Germany by a systemic understanding and modelling of the German BE with respect to sustainability aspects on a national and international level. Work packages of SYMOBIO deal with the footprints agricultural land use, forestry wood, water and GHG emissions. In addition to this, the project deals with the challenges in monitoring the social and economic sustainability dimensions of the BE. To assess the sustainability of the BE a set of indicators has to be defined and quantified that simultaneously look at the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the BE (see Egenolf, Bringezu 2019). Hence, one part of the project is to identify and assess key indicators that show the impacts of the BE on the (global) environment due to domestic use and/or production. The indicators for the socio-economic dimension are presented in this documentation. One of the key challenges to assess indicators for the BE is the lack of explicit data for BE in statistical classifications and some of the new parts just emerged over the last years. Different sectors such as agriculture or forestry can mainly or exclusively be attributed to the BE. For other sectors and activities such as fuel use or electricity production, part of the sector belongs to the BE, other parts not. Therefore, the socio-economic performance of the BE cannot be directly observed from official statistics, but for certain parts of the BE the relevance of BE activities (within the activity at hand) has to be assessed, using secondary statistics. As already discussed in D 2.6.1, the assessment of BEshares on the base of IO-Tables is one of the options to deal with this challenge (Distelkamp et al. 2017). Main emphasis of this paper is to assess past trends for selected indicators that deal with the economic and/or social sustainability of the BE in Germany. Socio-economic indicators have been identified that reflect the global value chains.

Keywords: German bioeconomy; SYMOBIO; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 Q2 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-gen
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