Constructing an open access economy-wide database for bioeconomy impact assessment in the European Union member states

The bioeconomy encompasses the extraction, processing and transformation of renewable biological resources and waste streams, connected to activities as diverse as food, feed, energy and manufacturing. Under the auspices of the European Union’s ‘Green Deal’ strategy, this broad collective of sectors is promoted as a cornerstone for achieving sustainable growth. Progress in developing ex-ante tools of economy-wide modelling analysis to assess its performance is, however, hindered by a paucity of consistent and comprehensive data. To overcome this shortcoming, the construction steps for a new set of open access social accounting matrices (dubbed ‘BioSAMs’) is described for a detailed and comprehensive selection of traditional and contemporary bio-based accounts for each of the EU member states. To illustrate its potential, a structural analysis based on three different and complementary methods (Rasmussen-Jones, hypothetical extraction method and eigenvector) is performed to classify bio-based sector wealth generating properties and to identify high performance (‘key’) sectors

Spatial disparities in the European agriculture: a regional analysis

This article examines the territorial imbalances in European agriculture during the period 1980 to 2001, by means of the information provided by various methodological instruments which allow us to overcome the drawbacks of conventional convergence analysis. The results obtained reveal that the regional distribution of productivity in the agricultural sector is characterized by the presence of positive spatial dependence. This fact implies that the European regions in close spatial proximity register similar levels of the variable under study, which highlights the relevance of geographical location in this context. The empirical evidence presented also shows that regional disparities have remained almost constant during the time interval considered. However, the increase in density around the European average explains the observed reduction in the degree of bipolarization, while intra-distribution mobility is relatively limited. Finally, the analysis carried out allows us to assess the role of variables such as country of origin, investment per worker in the agricultural sector, regional per capita income or the size of the agrifood industry, in explaining the dynamics of the distribution under analysis.