Statistical processing

Source data

The detailed material flow accounts are based on several statistical sources and accounts from Statistics Denmark. The most widely used are International trade in goods, Purchases and sales by manufacturing industries, and Environmental-Economic Accounts. Energy and emissions, Materials and waste and Annual national accounts.

Detailed information from the annual national accounts by industries (in 1000 DKK) are used as keys to allocation of the material flows on the use side when no direct sources are available.

Other data are obtained from reports and websites of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Danish Energy Agency, etc. and from websites etc. from companies and organisations.

Frequency of data collection

Data used for the detailed material flow accounts are retrieved from the basic statistics when the accounts are implemented. Data for most of the basic statistics are collected yearly. However some (e.g. the International trade in goods) are collected monthly.

Data collection

The main part of the data are delivered electronically from the primary statistics in Statistics Denmark. In addition, supplementary data are retrieved from freely accessible report and webpages.

Data validation

Besides the validation of data that takes place in relation to the primary statistics, further validation procedures are carried out specifically in relation to the material flow accounts. There is no uniform validation procedure applied for all data, but, typically, an assessment is made of whether the data have the right sign and order of magnitude. Further, different data are confronted to ensure, for instance, that the supply of each good is equal to the use.

Often, the validations lead to further investigations of a specific industry or material type. The breadth and depth of the various validation procedures are dependent on how important the specific data are assumed to be for the complete accounts' accuracy.

Data compilation

1) Data from the primary statistics are first converted and enumerated in order to ensure that all data are in tonnes, and that they have a complete coverage. The conversion factors are densities, unit weights and prices per kilo.

2) All available data are organised in a so-called supply-use table. On the supply side it shows extraction of natural resources, output and imports and on the use side it shows intermediate consumption, private and government consumption, capital formation, and changes in inventories, exports and emissions to the environment. The supply-use table at this level includes approximately 2000 natural resources, goods and residuals and a few hundred supply and use categories.

3) Missing data are estimated, typically by balancing procedures and use of allocation keys.

4) Obvious inconsistencies are assessed and adjusted, for instance, if total use of a good are greater than the total supply of the same good.

5) Each of the supply and use categories is assessed and adjusted in order to ensure that for the category (e.g. an industry) there is a balance between inputs on one side and outputs from the category on the other. The adjustments are made, for instance, by moving the use of materials from one industry, which has too much inputs to an industry that has to little inputs. The adjustments are as far as possible made in a way that do not alter the original primary data.

6) After the adjustments along both the material dimension (step 4) and the supply-use dimension (step 5) have been made, the detailed supply-use table is aggregated into the supply-use table that are published.

Adjustment

There are no adjustments besides those already mention under Data compilation.