بهره وری اقتصادی و زیست محیطی با استفاده از ماتریس حسابداری اجتماعی

This paper aims to show the utility of the so-called Social Accounting Matrix and Environmental Accounts (SAMEA) for economic and environmental efficiency analysis. The article uses the SAMEA for Spain in 2000, applied to water resources and greenhouse gas emissions. This matrix is used as a central core of a multisectorial model of economic and environmental performance, and it calculates the denominated “domestics SAMEA multipliers” and their decomposition into characteristic, direct, indirect and induced effects. These multipliers show some evaluation of economic and environmental efficiency. Also, we present an application of these multipliers that demonstrates that there is no causal interrelation between those sectors with higher economic backward linkages and those with higher environmental deterioration backward linkages.

Environmental problems caused by humans activities has led the establishment of rules that seek to prevent environmental degradation and to make economic and social development compatible with the viability of natural systems, in what has been termed sustainable economic development. Of special importance are two problems that are altering climatic processes and causing serious imbalance in ecosystem health: the shortage and dilution of resource quality and emissions polluting the atmosphere, causing the greenhouse effect. The importance of these issues makes it necessary to develop an analytical instrument to analyse them and to design the most appropriate economic and environmental strategies. This work contributes to this objective, using a methodology to analyse the efficiency of all productive sectors. To this means, we use the domestic Spanish Social Accounting Matrix and Environmental Accounts (SAMEA) for 2000, sourced from official data of the Spanish Statistical Office in Morilla (2004). This SAMEA integrates physical water circular flow and emissions to the atmosphere of greenhouse effect gasses (GE), together with the economic flow sourced from the National Accounting of Spain. Using this database, we obtain the domestic production multipliers, emissions of greenhouse effect gasses and consumption of water. We decompose the SAMEA in direct, indirect, induced, and a new multiplier, characteristic effects and, finally, the backward linkages. These decompositions allow us to analyze the efficiency – or not – of each activity sector along the whole economic circuit and to draw conclusions on the economic and environmental systems of Spain.

In this article we analysed the efficiency of the different economic activity sectors of the Spanish economy, using a SAMEA from 2000, with a grade detail to thirty homogeneous activity sectors and four institutional sectors, relative to the resources utilised and atmospheric pollution emission gases that they contribute to the greenhouse effect. Based on this matrix, we have calculated domestic “multipliers SAMEA.” Starting with these multipliers, we have obtained synthetic indicators of efficiency, and we evaluated the different productive processes of the activity sectors of the Spanish economy. Therefore, we have developed decomposition multipliers in their characteristic, direct, indirect and induced effects and also the backward linkages of production activities. These operative indicators of the total efficiency trajectory for each activity have been obtained by the economic circuit and also the repercussions from an integrated economic and environmental perspective. One of the main conclusions obtained is that, in the Spanish economy, there is no causal relation between sectors with greater capacity to generate chains of value added (measured through production) and those that cause greater environmental deterioration (measured by GE or water consumption). Therefore, it is possible to design an environmental policy that attempts to address the major deterioration that some activities cause, in a way that is compatible with minimal impact on developing the economic growth capacity of key sectors and to improving the efficiency of a sustainable economic development model. From this perspective, there are two activities that require greater intensity of focus in the processes of structural reformation, because of their limited economic–environmental efficiency in as compared to other activities: namely primary activities and electric power production. Finally,we consider that the estimated chronological series of SAMEAs opens up a new research line that will allow improved study of the temporal evolution of efficiency of the various activity sectors and will integrate the input–ouput and econometric models to reach a Dynamic Economic and Environmental Multisectorial Model.