ÖRME 5 - Rohmaterialäquivalente des Öst...

Imports and exports play an increasingly important role in terms of Austria’s material throughput. Material flow analysis (MFA) shows that imports currently account for approximately 35% of Austria’s domestic material consumption (DMC). At the same time, more and more countries are involved in global trade. Therefore, resource use at the national level strongly depends on patterns in international trade and division of labour. Hitherto, the import of highly-processed goods has led to resource ‘savings’ in the MFA logic as the intermediate inputs of material and energy required in the production of traded goods were not accounted for in the resource use of the importing country. This changes when the so-called Raw Material Equivalents (RME) of trade are calculated and import and export flows are considered including their used upstream material requirements. In previous projects financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management, the Institute of Social Ecology developed a method to calculate Raw Material Equivalents (RME) of Austrian trade for the years 1995, 1997 and 1999-2007. The calculation was a so-called hybrid-IO approach, based on an Input-Output Model combined with coefficients from Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). On the European and international level many research activities are currently ongoing that aim at quantifying upstream material requirements of foreign trade. In the previous project we therefore used 4 other approaches to calculate RME and compared to the hybrid-IO approach developed in the previous projects. Four methods will be used to calculate RME for the year 2007: (1) MRIO model „EORA“, (2) MRIO model based on the „Global Trade Analysis Project“ (GTAP), (3) MRIO model „World Input-Output Database“ (WIOD), and (4) RME coefficients developed by Eurostat.

The project ÖRME5 will carry out a detailed analysis of the empirical results of the RME calculation and the Austrian time series (1995-2007). In particular, the highly different results of different calculation methods, which were undertaken in the previous project, will be analysed in depth. This is necessary, before next steps towards an implementation of one or the other calculation method are undertaken. Additionally, the years 2008 and 2009 will be added to the existing time series.