Four million for economic database

The Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, has received four million euro from the European Commission for a three-year project to make a World Input-Output Database (WIOD). The faculty coordinates a consortium of ten European research institutes.

The database lists data on industrial production structures in over forty countries world-wide since 1995. These data include the use of various kinds of labour, capital, energy and other inputs in the production of goods and services, as well as the emission of pollutants and the use of scarce resources.

Innovative 

The innovative nature of the database is found in the combination of national production processes and world-wide trade between countries. This enables the user to measure, for example, the effects of trade with China and India on the wages of unskilled workers in Europe, or the world-wide environmental effects of consumption in the Netherlands. The availability of high-quality, internationally comparable data is usually the bottleneck in economic research, for which WIOD aims to offer a solution. The data can be used for policy decisions in the socio-economic area but are also useful for political decisions about international trade and climate change on both a national and a European level.

Fifty researchers

Prof. dr. Erik Dietzenbacher is academic coordinator of WIOD, and leads the consortium together with Prof. dr. Marcel Timmer and dr. Bart Los, all researchers at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. At least fifty people will work on the project in the coming three years, eight of which in Groningen.

The participating research institutes are: Austrian Institute of Economic Research (Vienna), Hochschule Konstanz (Konstanz), The Conference Board Europe (Brussels), Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (Vienna), Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (Mannheim), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (Sevilla), Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Athens), Centrale Recherche (Paris), Centraal Plan Bureau (The Hague), University of Groningen.

More information

- Prof. dr. H.W.A. Dietzenbacher, Prof. dr. Marcel Timmer

- www.wiod.org