Abstract
Multiregional input–output (MRIO) databases are used to analyze the impact of resource use and environmental impacts along global supply chains. To accurately account for pressures and impacts that are highly concentrated in specific sectors or regions of the world, such as agricultural and land-use-related impacts, MRIO databases are being fueled by increasingly more detailed data. To date no MRIO database exists which couples a high level of harmonized sector detail with high country resolution. Currently available databases either aggregate minor countries into rest-of-the-world (WIOD and EXIOBASE 3), or the high country resolution is achieved at the cost of non-harmonized or lower sectoral detail (Eora, OECD-ICIO or the GTAP-MRIO). This aggregation can cause potentially significant differences in environmental and socioeconomic impact calculations. In this paper, we describe the development of an EXIOBASE 3 variant that expands regional coverage from 49 regions to 214 countries, while keeping the high and harmonized sectoral detail. We show the relevance of disaggregation for land-use accounting. Previous rest-of-the-world regions supply one-third of global land, which is used to produce a large range of different products under very different levels of productivity. We find that the aggregation of regions leads to a difference in the balance of land embodied in trade of up to 6% and a difference of land embodied in imports of up to 68% for individual countries and up to 600% for land-use-relevant sectors. Whilst the database can still be considered experimental, it is expected to increase the accuracy of estimates for environmental footprint studies of the original EXIOBASE countries, and provides the first estimates for the countries in the previous rest-of-the world.
Highlights
From the early developments of domestic input–output analysis starting with Leontief (1936), the scope has broadened, both to account for trade relationships across economies (Leontief and Strout 1963) and to extend the framework to enable the attribution of social and environmental impacts, domestic and abroad, to economic activities (Leontief 1970; Miller and Blair 2009)
The aim of this paper is to describe the steps towards such an improved Multiregional input–output (MRIO), by increasing the country resolution of EXIOBASE 3 to explicitly including all domestic economies registered in the UN main aggregates database (214 countries, see below)
We have developed a regional extension of EXIOBASE 3 called EXIOBASE 3rx and studied the effect of regional aggregation on land use embodied in trade by comparing results to an aggregated version of the same database consisting of 49 regions
Summary
From the early developments of domestic input–output analysis starting with Leontief (1936), the scope has broadened, both to account for trade relationships across economies (Leontief and Strout 1963) and to extend the framework to enable the attribution of social and environmental impacts, domestic and abroad, to economic activities (Leontief 1970; Miller and Blair 2009). The strength of MRIO analysis as a methodology for environmental impact assessment is its ability to trace the impacts of products through the whole supply chain and attribute the impacts at different stages of production to final consumers (Moran and Wood 2014). This enables MRIO analysis to trace increasingly fragmented international supply chains across primary, secondary and tertiary producers, to give a more complete picture of the impacts of final consumption of nations, in comparison to biophysical accounting methods purely based on physical data (Bruckner et al 2015). The efforts to harmonize sectoral and regional data and satellite accounts may require additional aggregation that can compromise the accuracy of environmental and socioeconomic results (Steen-Olsen et al 2014; Lenzen 2011)
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