The concept of 'bioeconomy' is gathering momentum in European Union (EU) policy circles as a sustainable model of growth to reconcile continued wealth generation and employment with bio-based sustainable resource usage.
In the literature an economy-wide quantitative assessment covering the full diversity of this sector is lacking due to relatively poor data availability for disaggregated bio-based activities. This paper represents a contribution to this literature and a tentative to support the understanding of, among others, the employment generating impacts of the agriculture, food and other traditional (fishing, forestry, wood, pulp and paper) and non-traditional (biofuel, biochemical, bioenergy) bio-based sectors across the EU 28 Member States (MS). We employ a consistent and extended set of Input-Output Tables (IOTs) benchmarked to the year 2010 for the EU28 to recognize those bioeconomic sectors which potentially maximise economic value added, with a view to formulating a coherent approach for reconciling wealth- and/or employment generation with sustainable resource usage.
With the help of appropriate economic statistical techniques (i.e., hierarchical clustering technique), we profile and assess comparative structural patterns inherent within each of the EU member states' agri-food and bio-based sectors using multipliers analysis.