Socioeconomic impacts of seafood sectors in the European Union through a multi-regional input output model.

Fisheries, aquaculture, and seafood transformation sectors are components of the Green Deal roadmap promoting the transformation of the European Union into a resource-efficient, climate-friendly, and competitive economy. Whilst several studies have shown these sectors' socioeconomic national contributions, the method developed in this article aimed at demonstrating their importance at the European level and at showing the interlinkages that exist between countries, at the sub sectorial level. This article presents the development of a seafood European multi-regional input-output model methodology and its potentialities. The seafood sectors were disaggregated for each country from national input-output tables through a double disaggregation algorithm thanks to proxy input-output tables and STECF data, which highlighted the purchase of intermediate products at the STECF subsector level. The resulting disaggregated economic data for the seafood sectors were then linked to the multiregional turnover, gross value added, and jobs multipliers inverted from the FIGARO multiregional input-output table to obtain the indirect and induced socioeconomic impacts of the seafood sectors at the European level. The results showed economic leakages illustrated by the gross value-added multiplier. While shellfish farming, passive gear fishing, and active gear fishing, were the sectors in which the generated economic wealth remained the most in the European Union territory, a third of generated economic wealth by saltwater finfish farming and seafood transformations was captured outside the EU borders. Moreover, although France, the UK, and Spain are the main turnover contributors across sectors (except for micro and small seafood transformation companies), the impacts generated by the seafood industries greatly benefit the German economy that capture more economic wealth than it contributes across all sectors. This method provides a baseline scenario for further studies on the evaluation of socio-economic benefits of changes in practices such as circular economy emphasizing the interdependencies of supply chains at the European level.

Road project opportunity costs subject to a regional constraint on greenhouse gas emissions.

France has constrained the Aquitaine region to set up a climate plan to avoid an emission of 2883 ktCO(2)eq for the period 2007-2013. In parallel, the region has decided to carry out the construction of road infrastructures in order to avoid very high congestion costs. Those road projects will involve an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during that period. In the present context of strong sustainability, all emissions (direct and indirect) generated by those projects should be offset. At the regional level, the offsetting of GHG emissions is usually carried out by implementing carbon sequestration projects or projects that reduce energy demand. This paper aims at determining the maximum budget for financing GHG emissions offsetting projects, with computation being based on the opportunity costs of projects, the minimum cost of economic activity reduction required to offset emissions from those projects. The maximum budget devoted to GHG emissions offsetting projects should not exceed €(2001) 1920 M to €(2001) 3592 M, according to low/high traffic growth assumptions.