Measuring the Green Economy: exploring new definitions and testing new methods

Will McDowall and Hamid Nejadghorban

Discussion Papers from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence

Abstract: As the world confronts the challenges of multiple environmental crises – particularly the climate emergency – it is important for policymakers to be able to track the scale of economic activity related to the achievement of environmental goals. We highlight the shortcomings of existing definitions and typologies for measuring the ‘environmental goods and service sector’ and related environmental activities. We first set out a new approach to defining green economic activity, which aims to overcome some of the shortcomings of existing approaches. We then explore the potential of new web-scraping tools for supporting the estimation of green economic activity in the UK. We test the alignment between lists of firms identified as involved in low-carbon and renewable energy by an existing ONS survey and by a web-scraping tool (TheDataCity). Our analysis highlights both the limitations and the advantages of web-scraping tools and advocates their use only when coupled with sufficient relevant sector-specific expertise. We also provide illustrative estimates of the scale of green economic activity in the UK, adjusted for our new set of definitions, showing that the true scale of such activities may be at least 70% greater than is captured in the current ONS Environmental Goods and Services Sector estimates.

Keywords: green economy; environmental accounting; web scraping; environmental goods and services sector; official statistics; economic measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 E01 Q01 Q56 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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