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The FPB’s studies cover 11 main themes: Energy, Environmental economic accounts and analyses, International economy, Labour market, Macroeconomic forecasts and analyses, Public finances, Sectoral accounts and analyses, Social protection, demography and prospective studies, Structural studies, Sustainable development, Transport.
In international agreements, countries are considered responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions linked to their production activities. The carbon footprint provides an alternative assessment of this responsibility by attributing emissions to the country where the goods and services are consumed. This study presents the production-based CO2 emissions and the carbon footprint of the three Belgian regions for the year 2015. According to the results, the carbon footprint exceeds production-based emissions for all three regions. This implies that their contribution to global CO2 emissions is larger from a consumption perspective than from a production perspective.
The methodology behind the environmental economic accounts allows to link environmental data to economic data. As a result, the environmental economic accounts provide the ideal database for environmental economic analysis and the construction of indicators to monitor sustainable development policy targets. The demand for these types of analysis and indicators is clearly increasing worldwide, as more and more policy makers are becoming aware of the fact that imbalances in the environmental systems can put economic growth, well-being and development at risk. The European Commission actively supports environmental economic analysis by providing calculation tools to the EU member countries.
The Federal Planning Bureau has published several papers illustrating how the combination of environmental and economic data can lead to revealing insights. The Planning Papers series of the FPB contains several issues which give an overview of the environmental economic accounts that have been compiled for Belgium and provide the results of different applications of these accounts. A more detailed account of environmental economic analyses by the FPB can be found in the Working Paper series.
Over the past few years, the environmental economic analysis of the FPB has focused mainly on air emissions and energy use. These are some of the topics that were addressed: emission and energy intensities for both Belgian industries and households; the link of air emissions with offshoring; environmental leakage of air emissions through international trade; and the decomposition of the evolution of carbon dioxide emissions by the Belgian industries.
Federal Planning Bureau
