Environmental Sector in Sweden, 2003-2007 E-mail
Thursday, April 30, 2009

Sweden follows the definition of an environmental establishment given by OECD/Eurostat in their manual for data collection from 1999 (From The Environmental goods & services industry – manual for data collection and analysis, 1999). The manual describes which environmental areas the establishments are to be classified according to. Eurostat plans to release an updated manual during 2009 and Statistics Sweden have been active in the writing of this. One change in the new manual, compared to the one from 1999, is that the environmental area “Drinking water” (NACE code 41 in its 2002 version) is removed. The current statistics is already taking this into account.

http://www.scb.se/Pages/TableAndChart____206294.aspx

System of Environmental and Economic Accounts

To list of tables

Environmental sector in Sweden, 2003-2007

Number of establishments, turnover, export and employed

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Establishments

12 436

12 505

13 336

13 495

13 929

Turnover (million SEK)

165 393

169 381

188 093

215 476

233 902

Export (million SEK)

25 705

28 553

32 920

40 245

42 160

Employed, total

62 951

67 879

70 035

73 171

*

Women

14 417

15 554

16 266

17 785

*

Men

48 534

52 326

53 769

55 386

*

* Data on employment for 2007 is unavailable due to time lag in statistics

Source: SCB

Comments

Recent change in how statistics of the environmental sector is presented
We have earlier presented the statistics broken up on primary and secondary environmental establishments. New for this year is that the statistics is now presented in total values. During 2008 we have included information of environmental share for all the secondary establishments in the environmental sector population, indicating how much of the establishment that has an environmental activity.

Change in content
Statistics Sweden follows the definition of an environmental establishment given by OECD/Eurostat in their manual for data collection from 1999 (From The Environmental goods & services industry – manual for data collection and analysis, 1999). The manual describes which environmental areas the establishments are to be classified according to. Eurostat plans to release an updated manual during 2009 and Statistics Sweden have been active in the writing of this. One change in the new manual, compared to the one from 1999, is that the environmental area “Drinking water” (NACE code 41 in its 2002 version) is removed. The current statistics, published above, is already taking this into account.

Revision of time-series
In earlier years it has been difficult to interpret the differences between the years, since we continuously include new establishments in the database and therefore improve the quality. As a result of this we have not been able to explain a trend as merely an actual increase, since it just as well could depend on the improved quality in the database. However, this year we have revised the time-series back to 2003. We have created a new time-series from 2003 to 2007, making the years comparable to each other.

Definitions

Definition environmental sector
Statistics Sweden has followed the definition of an environmental establishment given by OECD/Eurostat in their manual for data collection from 1999: (From The Environmental goods & services industry – manual for data collection and analysis, 1999)

"The environmental goods and services industry consists of activities which produce goods and services to measure, prevent, limit, minimise or correct environmental damage to water, air, and soil as well as problems related to waste, noise and eco-systems. This includes cleaner technologies, products and services which reduce environmental risk and minimise pollution and resource use."

Methodology behind environmental sector statistics
Since 2000 Statistics Sweden has developed a database consisting of establishments active in the environmental sector. The population is based on establishments and there were around 14 000 establishments in the population of 2007. A company can be made up of one or many establishments. In the database each establishment is classified according to its environmental area as well as based on if its environmental activity is primary or secondary in relation to the total activity of the establishment. If the environmental activity is assumed to be over 50 percent it is classified as primary. For establishments with only secondary activity, that is under 50 per cent, only its respectively environmental share of employment, turnover and export is included in the total result. 60 per cent of the establishments in 2007 were classified as primary and 40 per cent as secondary.

There are environmental establishments in most of the industries (NACE). Information of each establishment’s NACE code is found in The Business Database at Statistics Sweden. More information about the Business Database: http://www.scb.se/templates/Standard____180453.asp. A selection of NACE’s are included in its entity and these are NACE 25.12, 37, 51.57 and 90. (NACE Rev 1.1 SNI 2002 codes, not the new NACE Rev 2 SNI 2007). In order to locate establishments outside of these NACE codes a number of sources are used, for example the Energy statistics at Statistics Sweden, different industry organisations and Eniro web search.

Source file

 

 
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