Effect of aggregation and disaggregation on embodied material use of products in input–output analysis

Arjan de Koning, Martin Bruckner, Stephan Lutter, Richard Wood, Konstantin Stadler and Arnold Tukker

Ecological Economics, 2015, vol. 116, issue C, 289-299

Abstract: Consumption-based material footprints calculated with multi-regional input–output (mrIO) analysis are influenced by the sectoral, spatial and material aggregations used in the mrIO tables, and lack of disaggregation can be a source of uncertainty. This study investigated the effect of the resolution of mrIO databases on consumption-based material footprints. The effect of aggregation was investigated by constructing input–output tables with different spatial, product and material category resolutions and comparing the calculated material footprints. Our results indicate that the material footprints of countries calculated using the different spatial and product aggregations are in general in the order of a few percent, with outliers in the order of 25% difference. The use of IO models with a low product category resolution (e.g. 60 product categories) to calculate the embodied material use of individual products will likely result in inaccurate estimations of the total embodied material for some product categories. Aggregating the original 46 material categories into 16 categories changes the calculated material footprint of countries by about 30%. This result strongly suggests that the material data used to create the extensions for the IO framework should be collected at the highest resolution that is practically feasible.

Keywords: Material footprint; Carbon footprint; Input–output analysis; Aggregation; Disaggregation; Uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915002232
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:116:y:2015:i:c:p:289-299

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.05.008

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().