The environmental footprint of public versus private services

[Gough,I]

To anyone who can help:

I am trying to gather together data on the respective GHG emissions per £ or € or $ spent of publicly provided services and privately provided services. I know that the dividing line is often blurred but imagine there is cross-national data which would enable rough comparisons to be drawn. The obvious places to start would be health and education services. Of course, this could be extended to other measures of material footprint etc.

Can anyone point me to some research on this?

Thanks,

Ian

Ian Gough FAcSS FRSA

Visiting Professor in CASE and Associate of GRI, London School of Economics; Emeritus Professor, University of Bath https://personal.lse.ac.uk/goughi/

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/view/lseauthor/Gough_Ian.html

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[Tukker, A.]

Hi Ian,

 

I wonder if you would find a lot of differentiation. Straightforward way of doing footprints is with Input-output models. A Euro final demand in an expenditure category, use the Leontief inverse of your IO model, and you have a footprint of that Euro / $. It does not matter if that Euro or $ is spended by a final consumer or government.

 

What can matter is that the utitility per Euro/$differs, or, if you have production of the service by (semi)government has a different structure as production by private parties (the infamous example that the same level of health care in the US is way more expensive as in Europe, and that the overall health/life expectation in Europe is better as in the US). IOs are usually not specific enough to make the difference. And indeed, I have seen few if any studies exploring your question.

 

Kind regards/Met vriendelijke groet

 

Arnold

 

 

Prof. Dr. Arnold Tukker,

Scientific director and head of the department of Industrial Ecology

Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Einsteinweg 2, Leiden (Tue, Wed, Thu afternoon and Fri)

Senior Researcher, TNO, Anna van Buerenplein 1, Den Haag (Mon, Thu morning)

e-mail tuk...@cml.leidenuniv.nl; tel. +31 71 5275632/5615; mob. +31 6 51980344

Visit my Google scholar page at http://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=kG-dn38AAAAJ&hl=nl  

Read our paper on Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations in PNAS (4 December 2017) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/28/1711889114.short?rss=1

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