Improving Transformation of Emissions from Industries to Products: Product Technology Assumption, Disaggregation of Key Industry and Almon’s Procedure

Abstract

An allocation of emissions from industries to product groups is an inevitable step, wherever the embodied emissions (or energy) of products are calculated with the environmentally extended input-output analysis. Within this paper, we suggest and explain steps for the improvement of commonly used techniques. First, we explain why the widely applied industry technology assumption to construct product-by-product input-output model is an unsuitable method for the transformation of emissions and why product technology assumption should be used instead. Second, we cope with the resulting negative values, which is the well known limitation of the product technology assumption, by utilizing Almon’s procedure. Third, we demonstrate how disaggregation of the industry with dominant emissions and diverse technologies for this kind of emission transformation may improve the results. We apply these steps to emissions from NAMEA for the Czech Republic and discuss the results. Additionally, we provide an easy-to-use VBA tool with Excel interface to calculate Almon’s transformation automatically.

Keywords

• Input-output tables
• product-by-product
• product technology assumption
• Almon’s procedure
• transformation of industries to products
• industry disaggregation
• NAMEA