Mapping the Structure of the World Economy

Abstract

We have developed a new series of environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) tables with applications in carbon, water, and ecological footprinting, and Life-Cycle Assessment, as well as trend and key driver analyses. Such applications have recently been at the forefront of global policy debates, such as about assigning responsibility for emissions embodied in internationally traded products. The new time series was constructed using advanced parallelized supercomputing resources, and significantly advances the previous state of art because of four innovations. First, it is available as a continuous 20-year time series of MRIO tables. Second, it distinguishes 187 individual countries comprising more than 15,000 industry sectors, and hence offers unsurpassed detail. Third, it provides information just 1-3 years delayed therefore significantly improving timeliness. Fourth, it presents MRIO elements with accompanying standard deviations in order to allow users to understand the reliability of data. These advances will lead to material improvements in the capability of applications that rely on input-output tables. The timeliness of information means that analyses are more relevant to current policy questions. The continuity of the time series enables the robust identification of key trends and drivers of global environmental change. The high country and sector detail drastically improves the resolution of Life-Cycle Assessments. Finally, the availability of information on uncertainty allows policy-makers to quantitatively judge the level of confidence that can be placed in the results of analyses.

A synthesis of carbon in international trade

“…Table 1. A summary of the trends in three time-series studies of consumption-based emission estimates for key countries and regions Wiebe et al, 2012;Lenzen et al, 2012). Comparisons are shown over the common time periods of each estimate (a) 1995-2005, (b) 1990-2009.…”

An Introduction to Environmentally-Extended Input-Output Analysis

“…There are now several well-known multi-regional input-output databases and models that can be used for EEIO analysis at the global scale, including Eora [30,31], EXIOBASE [32,33], the Global Trade and Analysis Project (GTAP) [27,34,35], and the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) [36]. Newer databases have made a particular effort to address many of the limitations mentioned above, especially with regard to sector resolution.…”

A network approach for assembling and linking input–output models

“…Recent examples of the application of this assumption to the assembly of MRIOs are Peters et al (2011), Lenzen et al (2012a), Tukker et al (2013) and Wood et al (2015), where detailed bilateral trade data 2 are linked to national IO tables (which describe how much of a given commodity is imported, but not its country of origin). 3 Imputation can occur at different levels of detail, e.g.…”

“…More detailed information might be available, for example, a breakdown of intermediate vs. final exports (Lenzen et al, 2012a;Dietzenbacher et al, 2013b). For brevity we will not consider these additional situations although they can be easily incorporated in the general framework presented here.…”

“…For example, EXIOBASE (Tukker et al, 2013) currently covers only 49 regions because of the computational limitations of having both high sectoral detail and country coverage (Tukker et al, 2011). The producers of Eora (Lenzen et al, 2012a) had to develop their own custom balancing algorithms (Lenzen et al, 2009) instead of using commercially available solvers in order to streamline the memory requirements in balancing their global MRIO table as much as possible. Efforts to link agricultural databases to MRIO databases are producing databases of some 2.5 billion variables under conventional approaches (Bruckner, 2015).…”