Working Paper 19-08 - Quantifying environmental leakage for Belgium

This paper illustrates the deficiency of the production approach as a tool to measure a country's responsibility for international environmental impacts. A use approach is presented as a more suitable tool. The difference between the two approaches is determined by a better grasp of international trade, which can lead to environmental leakage when a country specialises in the production of environmentally friendly products and has the environmentally unfriendly products which it consumes produced abroad. We show that in the period 1995-2002 Belgium was on average a provider of air emission intensive products for the rest of the world. Environmental leakage was mostly negative. However, the evolution of the Belgian environmental terms of trade shows that by 2002 its imports had become considerably more air emission intensive with respect to its exports than in 1995. There are indications that this evolution is due to a considerable increase of extra-EU imports of air emission intensive products. This in turn could point to environmentally inspired offshoring. However, the currently available data do not allow us to test this hypothesis.Environmental leakage, Environmental terms of trade, Input-output analysis

Working Paper 13-09 - Qualitative Employment Multipliers for the Belgian Environmental Industry

The present paper computes cumulative employment generated by the Belgian environmental industry. Relying on Belgian input-output tables for the year 2000 and on detailed employment data (SAM sub]matrix), we investigate the patterns of the employment in the environmental industry, by considering the worker types differentiated by gender, educational attainment or a combination of these characteristics. The employment multiplier analysis of environmental employment reveals some interesting differences between employment of the overall economy and environmental employment for the level of education as well as for the gender type.