Abstract
This article considers the specification and aggregation errors that arise from estimating embodied \(\text{ CO }_{2}\) emissions and embodied water use with environmentally extended national input–output (IO) models, instead of with an environmentally extended international IO model. Model specification errors result from the use of domestic environmental and domestic technology coefficients to estimate emissions or resources that are embodied in international trade. For \(\text{ CO }_{2}\) footprints, unacceptably large overestimations arise from using domestic emission coefficients, which are only partly canceled out by using domestic technology coefficients. For water use footprints both specification errors are smaller, but hardly cancel out. Sectoral aggregation errors occur when combining the 129 EXIOPOL industries to 59 EU industries and 10 broad sectors. The latter aggregation creates the largest errors. Spatial aggregation errors arise from combining 43 individual EXIOPOL countries in four broad regions and “the rest of the world”. Substantial, unacceptable errors occur again, now especially in relation to water use.
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Notes
The different types of aggregation errors may also interact, as noted by Su and Ang (2012).
Trade flows with the RoW are accounted for in the database, but are not included in the model presented in this paper.
Total water use in agricultural industries is the sum of the use of blue and green water. Blue water refers to rainwater evaporation; green water is ground- and surface water evaporation due to production. Agricultural water use estimates originate from the LPJmL model (Bondeau et al. 2007; Rost et al. 2008). Water use data for livestock and manufacturing industries has been modeled with the WaterGAP2 model (Alcamo et al. 2003).
We denote matrices by bold capital letters, vectors by bold lower case letters, and scalars by italicized lower case letters. A prime indicates a transposed matrix or vector. A hat indicates a diagonal matrix of this vector. The vector i is a summation vector with ones. The identity matrix I thus equals \(\hat{\mathbf{{i}}}\).
In other words, our measure represents the only possible decomposition of the errors defined here. Hence, we do not average over multiple decompositions as is generally done when alternative decompositions are possible (see e.g. Dietzenbacher and Los 1998).
We use “true” to indicate that this estimate is based on the most detailed set of data, which serves as our reference case, but which, of course, still contains unknown other errors.
The total coefficient matrix \(\mathbf{A}^{{\bullet }r}\), used here, deviates from the IO data published by the individual countries due to the estimation method of the international IO table (see Bouwmeester and Oosterhaven 2009). The country-by-country trade flows have been made consistent by revaluing them in basic prices of the producing (i.e., exporting instead of importing) country.
We present the differences between their DTA model and their MRIO “Transport exogenous” model. The GTAP database includes an international transport pool, which records the product being transported but not the bilateral link between the supplier and user of the transport service. In the “Transport exogenous” model, the pool is not allocated to use sectors, such that it gets treated as a final demand category, a designation that is adjusted in the “Transport endogenous” model. However, the authors issue several caveats and warn that this model should not be used to calculate consumption-based emissions without additional verification and model development.
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Acknowledgments
This work is part of the EXIOPOL project (http://www.feem-project.net/exiopol), an integrated project funded by the European Union, under Framework Programme 6, Priority 6.3 Global Change and Ecosystems, Grant agreement no. 037033-2. We thank our partners for their cooperation and Arnold Tukker, the project leader, for stimulating comments. We also thank Richard Wood, Glen Peters, an anonymous referee, and the editor, Christian Vossler, for their comments on earlier versions of the paper, and Elisabeth Nevins Caswell for editing our English.
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Bouwmeester, M.C., Oosterhaven, J. Specification and Aggregation Errors in Environmentally Extended Input–Output Models. Environ Resource Econ 56, 307–335 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-013-9649-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-013-9649-8