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.
A macro-economic analysis of the activity of multinational groups is of particular interest for economic policy in a country like Belgium with a longstanding tradition of openness to foreign investment. This working paper combines a database of enterprise groups that are active in Belgium with industry-level data from the national accounts to show that multinational groups play an important role in the Belgian economy. Together, foreign affiliates and firms that are part of a Belgian multinational group account for more than 40% of GDP, 25% of total employment and 75% of exports.
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