Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is often used to measure the economic health of a country or region. Definitions of GDP are maintained by several national and international economic organizations, such as the OECD and the International Monetary Fund.
A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product (GDP), Gross national income (GNI), net national income (NNI), and adjusted national income. All are specially concerned with counting the total amount of goods and services produced within the economy and by various sectors. The boundary is usually defined by geography or citizenship, and it is also defined as the total income of the nation and also restrict the goods and services that are counted. For instance, some measures count only goods & services that are exchanged for money, excluding bartered goods, while other measures may attempt to include bartered goods by imputing monetary values to them.
In economics, output is the quantity and quality of goods or services produced in a given time period, within a given economic network, whether consumed or used for further production. The economic network may be a firm, industry, or nation. The concept of national output is essential in the field of macroeconomics. It is national output that makes a country rich, not large amounts of money.
In economics, an input–output model is a quantitative economic model that represents the interdependencies between different sectors of a national economy or different regional economies. Wassily Leontief (1906–1999) is credited with developing this type of analysis and earned the Nobel Prize in Economics for his development of this model.
National accounts or national account systems (NAS) are the implementation of complete and consistent accounting techniques for measuring the economic activity of a nation. These include detailed underlying measures that rely on double-entry accounting. By design, such accounting makes the totals on both sides of an account equal even though they each measure different characteristics, for example production and the income from it. As a method, the subject is termed national accounting or, more generally, social accounting. Stated otherwise, national accounts as systems may be distinguished from the economic data associated with those systems. While sharing many common principles with business accounting, national accounts are based on economic concepts. One conceptual construct for representing flows of all economic transactions that take place in an economy is a social accounting matrix with accounts in each respective row-column entry.
Greenhouse gas inventories are emission inventories of greenhouse gas emissions that are developed for a variety of reasons. Scientists use inventories of natural and anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions as tools when developing atmospheric models. Policy makers use inventories to develop strategies and policies for emissions reductions and to track the progress of those policies.
Material flow analysis (MFA), also referred to as substance flow analysis (SFA), is an analytical method to quantify flows and stocks of materials or substances in a well-defined system. MFA is an important tool to study the bio-physical aspects of human activity on different spatial and temporal scales. It is considered a core method of industrial ecology or anthropogenic, urban, social and industrial metabolism. MFA is used to study material, substance, or product flows across different industrial sectors or within ecosystems. MFA can also be applied to a single industrial installation, for example, for tracking nutrient flows through a waste water treatment plant. When combined with an assessment of the costs associated with material flows this business-oriented application of MFA is called material flow cost accounting. MFA is an important tool to study the circular economy and to devise material flow management. Since the 1990s, the number of publications related to material flow analysis has grown steadily. Peer-reviewed journals that publish MFA-related work include the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ecological Economics, Environmental Science and Technology, and Resources, Conservation, and Recycling.
In economics, gross value added (GVA) is the measure of the value of goods and services produced in an area, industry or sector of an economy. "Gross value added is the value of output minus the value of intermediate consumption; it is a measure of the contribution to GDP made by an individual producer, industry or sector; gross value added is the source from which the primary incomes of the System of National Accounts (SNA) are generated and is therefore carried forward into the primary distribution of income account."
Urban metabolism (UM) is a model to facilitate the description and analysis of the flows of the materials and energy within cities, such as undertaken in a material flow analysis of a city. It provides researchers with a metaphorical framework to study the interactions of natural and human systems in specific regions. From the beginning, researchers have tweaked and altered the parameters of the urban metabolism model. C. Kennedy and fellow researchers have produced a clear definition in the 2007 paper The Changing Metabolism of Cities claiming that urban metabolism is "the sum total of the technical and socio-economic process that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and elimination of waste." With the growing concern of climate change and atmospheric degradation, the use of the urban metabolism model has become a key element in determining and maintaining levels of sustainability and health in cities around the world. Urban metabolism provides a unified or holistic viewpoint to encompass all of the activities of a city in a single model.
Material input per unit of service (MIPS) is an economic concept, originally developed at the Wuppertal Institute, Germany in the 1990s. The MIPS concept can be used to measure eco-efficiency of a product or service and applied in all scales from a single product to complex systems. The calculation takes into account materials required to produce a product or service. The total material input (MI) is divided by the number of service units (S). For example, in case of a passenger car, the number of service units is the total number of passenger kilometres during the whole life span of the vehicle. The lower the material input per kilometre, the more eco-efficient is the vehicle. The whole life-cycle of a product or service is measured when MIPS values are calculated. This allows comparisons of resource consumption of different solutions to produce the same service. When a single product is examined, the MIPS calculations reveal the magnitude of resource use along the life-cycle and help to focus efforts on the most significant phases to reduce environmental burden of the product.
Domestic material consumption is a measurement of the total amount of material directly used in an economy, excluding hidden flows. DMC equals DMI minus exports.
System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) is a framework to compile statistics linking environmental statistics to economic statistics. SEEA is described as a satellite system to the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). This means that the definitions, guidelines and practical approaches of the SNA are applied to the SEEA. This system enables environmental statistics to be compared to economic statistics as the system boundaries are the same after some processing of the input statistics. By analysing statistics on the economy and the environment at the same time it is possible to show different patterns of sustainability for production and consumption. It can also show the economic consequences of maintaining a certain environmental standard.
Economy-wide material flow accounts (EW-MFA) is a framework to compile statistics linking flows of materials from natural resources to a national economy. EW-MFA are descriptive statistics, in physical units such as tonnes per year.
Social metabolism or socioeconomic metabolism is the set of flows of materials and energy that occur between nature and society, between different societies, and within societies. These human-controlled material and energy flows are a basic feature of all societies but their magnitude and diversity largely depend on specific cultures, or sociometabolic regimes. Social or socioeconomic metabolism is also described as "the self-reproduction and evolution of the biophysical structures of human society. It comprises those biophysical transformation processes, distribution processes, and flows, which are controlled by humans for their purposes. The biophysical structures of society and socioeconomic metabolism together form the biophysical basis of society."
In economic and environmental fields, decoupling refers to an economy that would be able to grow without corresponding increases in environmental pressure. In many economies, increasing production (GDP) raises pressure on the environment. An economy that would be able to sustain economic growth while reducing the amount of resources such as water or fossil fuels used and delink environmental deterioration at the same time would be said to be decoupled. Environmental pressure is often measured using emissions of pollutants, and decoupling is often measured by the emission intensity of economic output.
Natural capital accounting is the process of calculating the total stocks and flows of natural resources and services in a given ecosystem or region. Accounting for such goods may occur in physical or monetary terms. This process can subsequently inform government, corporate and consumer decision making as each relates to the use or consumption of natural resources and land, and sustainable behaviour.
Land footprint is the real amount of land, wherever it is in the world, that is needed to produce a product, or used by an organisation or by a nation.
Environmentally extended input–output analysis (EEIOA) is used in environmental accounting as a tool which reflects production and consumption structures within one or several economies. As such, it is becoming an important addition to material flow accounting.
Sustainable Materials Management is a systemic approach to using and reusing materials more productively over their entire lifecycles. It represents a change in how a society thinks about the use of natural resources and environmental protection. By looking at a product's entire lifecycle new opportunities can be found to reduce environmental impacts, conserve resources, and reduce costs.
A circular economy is an alternative way countries manage their resources, in which usage of products in the traditional linear make, use, and dispose method is not implemented. Instead, resources are used for their maximum utility throughout their life cycle and regenerated in a cyclical pattern minimizing waste. They strive to create economic development through environmental and resource protection. The ideas of a circular economy were officially adopted by China in 2002, when the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party legislated it as a national endeavor though the various sustainability initiatives which were implemented in the previous decades starting in 1973. China adopted the circular economy due to the environmental damage and resource depletion that was occurring from going through its industrialization process. China is currently a world leader in the production of resources, where it produces 46% of the world's aluminum, 50% of steel and 60% of cement, while it has consumed more raw materials than all the countries a part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) combined. In 2014, China created 3.2 billion tonnes of industrial solid waste, where 2 billion tonnes were recovered using recycling, incineration, reusing and composting. By 2025, China is anticipated to produce up to one quarter of the world's municipal solid waste.
