Measuring Technological Change through an Extended Structural Decomposition Analysis: An Application to EU-28 Primary Sectors (2010–2015)

This paper addresses the input–output structural decomposition for an economic analysis. The objective is to determine the causes of changes in production in these sectors with a particular focus on disaggregating the technological change by distribution factors associated with a specific normalization of the Leontief inverse. In calculating the net multipliers, an attempt was made to exclude each sectors’ own consumption in a satisfactory manner. However, the treatment of own consumption when introducing a time factor requires further investigation to avoid questionable measurements. An empirical application is presented regarding agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors in six EU-28 countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) over the 2010–2015 period. In general, a typical characteristic of primary sectors is the accumulation of a significant amount of their own consumption, facilitated by the design of their own symmetric accounting methods. Therefore, attention is focused on these sectors so as to reveal possible analysis techniques that will provide nuance or validate existing techniques.

Drivers of global nitrogen emissions

Nitrogen is crucial for sustaining life. However, excessive reactive nitrogen (Nr) in the form of ammonia, nitrates, nitrogen oxides or nitrous oxides affects the quality of water, air and soil, resulting in human health risks. This study aims to assess the drivers of Nr emissions by analysing six determinants: nitrogen efficiency (Nr emissions per unit of production), production recipe (inter-sectoral dependencies), final demand composition (consumption baskets of households), final demand destination (consumption vs. investment balance), affluence (final consumption per capita) and population. To this end, we construct a detailed multi-regional input-output database featuring data on international trade between 186 countries to undertake a global structural decomposition analysis of a change in global Nr emissions from 1997-2017. Our analysis shows that nitrogen efficiency has improved over the assessed time-period, however affluence, final demand destination and population growth have resulted in an overall increase in Nr emissions. We provide a global perspective of the drivers of nitrogen emissions at a detailed country level, and breakdown the change in emissions into contribution from domestic footprint and rest-of-world footprint. We highlight that food production coupled with growing international trade is increasing Nr emissions worldwide.

Research on China’s embodied carbon import and export trade from the perspective of value-added trade

The development of globalization has separated the production and consumption of products spatially, and the international trade of products has become a carrier of embodied carbon trade. This paper adopted the perspective of value-added trade to calculate the amount of embodied carbon trade of China from 2006 to 2015 and perform a structural decomposition analysis of the changes in China’s embodied carbon trade. This study found that: (1) China’s embodied carbon exports are much larger than its embodied carbon imports, and there are differences between countries. China imported the largest amount of embodied carbon from South Korea, and it exported the largest amount of embodied carbon to the United States. (2) The structural decomposition analysis shows that changes in the value-added carbon emission coefficient during the study period would have caused China’s embodied carbon trade to decrease, and changes in value-added trade would have caused China’s embodied carbon trade to increase. Therefore, countries trading with China need to strengthen their cooperation with China in energy conservation, emission reduction, and product trade. In order to accurately reflect China’s embodied carbon trade, it is necessary to calculate embodied carbon trade from the perspective of value-added trade.

Main Factors Determining the Economic Production Sustained by Public Long-Term Care Spending in Spain

Policy reforms of 2012 introduced in Spain a set of austerity measures to emerge from the 2008 global recession. However, attaining the sustainability of the long-term care (LTC) system by reducing public spending overlooks the drawbacks of a lower demand to meet dependency needs. In this context, this study is intended to provide a deeper insight into the economic factors affecting the shifts in the industrial output sustained by LTC spending before and after the austerity measures adopted in 2012. To accomplish this, we first apply a model based on the Input-Output methodology to quantify the output arisen from the consumption demand to meet the dependency needs covered by LTC spending in 2009, 2012 and 2015. Using the results of this model, we carry out a Structural Decomposition Analysis to explore the main drivers of change in the Spanish economic production for 2009–2012 and 2012–2015. The findings reveal that LTC demand factors have proven more relevant than technology factors in increasing production for the two periods considered. Such findings might guide political decision-making on the management of the LTC system in Spain, showing that public LTC spending does not merely contribute to the welfare of dependents, but also may boost economic production.