Estimating employment and value added in the bioeconomy of EU regions: a methodological proposal

The analysis and monitoring of the bioeconomy at the regional level is of interest for policy design and evaluation, notably regarding the objectives of the European Union's (EU) Bioeconomy Strategy (2018) of creating jobs and opportunities for sustainable regional economic development. Although some initiatives provide estimates of the size and/or regional distribution of the bioeconomy in some countries, there are no homogeneous datasets allowing the analysis of the regional dimension of the EU's bioeconomy. This report describes a methodology to estimate employment and value added of the bioeconomy sectors at the NUTS2 (regional) level in the EU. The approach consists of a systematic combination of bio-based shares (defined as the share in biomass content of all products produced by a given sector) from the publically available JRC-Bioeconomics database with Eurostat regional statistics for allocating employment and value added of the bioeconomy sectors amongst regions. When missing from Eurostat data sources, regional series are estimated by applying various criteria to regionalise national statistics. Finally, a range of missing data estimation algorithms are executed in order to complete the dataset. Preliminary results evidence that the proposed methodology manages to fill in the majority of missing series and data in the initial raw datasets. Therefore, we are able to extract some key figures and trends for the regional bioeconomies in the EU. We then discuss our results through comparisons with available official statistics, other previous estimates and expert feedback to identify the limitations of the methodology and, based on that, potential future improvement. The main challenges identified in this process are related to the absence of data for some sectors at the regional level, requiring assumptions about the regional distribution of employment and value added within a country, as well as the use of national bio-based shares at the regional level, masking regional heterogeneities in the use of biomass for production.