Estimating Companies and Sectoral Sustainability in Resource Consumption

Ramona CRUCERU, Cristina PARTAL
2013 Economia: Seria Management  
The economic growth during the last decades has been associated with a continuously increasing intensive use of material resources, in spite of the technological progress. The historical data over a century reveals that the current economic system supports to a certain degree the inefficient use of resources by allowing large waste, low conversions factors, pricing below true costs. The paper intends to address some interesting points based on observations derived from statistical evidence on
more » ... source indicators. The resource efficiency indicators relate to the following broad categories - overall (national) resource consumption/ efficiency and industry resource consumption/efficiency. In the paper, the first category is addressed by involving the resource productivity - measured as the volume of Gross Domestic Product in market prices (GDP) over Domestic Material Consumption (DMC), it is studied for the period 2000-2009 based on the Eurostat database. The indicator has increased by 16 %, with a slightly larger rhythm as compared to the growth in GDP (around 12 %) over the same period, indicating that in the EU27 there was placed in a separate and decoupled growth pattern from that one of domestic resource consumption. Yet the evolution was very specific at the member states' level depending on domestic context – the economic structure, the competitiveness level, the impact of financial crisis etc. Even if the most frequently used to estimate the efficiency of the resource consumption is resource productivity, the link with other time series or structure indicators bring to light new perspectives in revealing the patterns of consumption and policy actions to improve the resource efficient use.
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