Domestic Material Consumption in Europe: a new perspective at regional level

What is it about?

We present an econometric approach to infer harmonised regional estimates from broadly-available socioeconomic data. Unlikely similar approaches, our method makes explicit the territorial regimes of sub-national territories by estimating and applying country-specific parameters. We tested the method for domestic material consumption (an indicator available at national level measuring the amount of material consumed within an economy) providing regional estimates consistent with previous findings. The method can also be adapted with relative ease to support research in other fields challanged by severe data scarcity.

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Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The availability of harmonized and granular information is critical for the design of place‐sensitive policies towards more sustainable economies. Unfortunately, accessibility to disaggregated data at subnational levels remains an exception in many geographies and policy domains. The methodology presented in this paper provides researchers and decision‐makers with an effective tool to generate local data responsive to territorial contexts.