Monitoring Socio-Economic Aspects of The European Bioeconomy: From Output-Based Quantification to Screening for Policy Coherence

Summary

This thesis seeks to answer the overall research question “How to monitor the transition towards the bioeconomy across economic sectors in the EU, and strengthen policy coherence?” It elaborates an output-based approach to measure employment, value added and labour productivity in all sectors of the bioeconomy in the European Union from 2008 to 2017. Cross-country comparison and labour productivity decomposition suggest increasing levels of labour productivity and sectoral diversity along a bioeconomy transition pathway led by Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Ireland. The method and results are compared with alternative approaches published in the literature. Finally, the thesis evaluates the coherence between the European Bioeconomy strategy and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by performing correlation tests. Main negative correlations are observed between agro-biodiversity (SDG 2), domestic material consumption of biomass (SDG 8 and 12), agriculture and industrial developments (SDG 2 and SDG 9) and a wide array of bioeconomy-related SDG indicators.