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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Circular economy; Multiregional input output model; Public policy; Seafood; Socioeconomic impacts; Value chain.