Towards a Fair Allocation of Raw Material Use for Indicators of Resource Efficiency

This paper examines the metrics used to assess the degree of efficiency of raw material utilization. Indicators of resource productivity used by various policy bodies typically divide gross domestic product (GDP) for, e.g., a country or a region, by an estimate of the amount of raw materials consumed by that country or region. But this estimate may be based on a variety of metrics defined using different system boundaries. This paper compares estimates of resource productivity calculated using three different metrics for raw material consumption: domestic material consumption (DMC), raw material consumption (RMC, i.e., “material footprint”) and raw material input (RMI). The comparison is made using datasets published by UNEP and based on the EORA environmentally-extended multiple-region input-output model.