Impulses for Growth and Employment through Profitable Savings in ...

celerate the spread of best practice with
special support programmes. Moreover,
via its own procurement and by improving
consumer information with regard to life
cycle cost it can enhance market access
and the spread of profitable dematerialised
goods and services. And the government
can make sure that every university
graduate is in command of the ABC of
dematerialization in his or her profession.
The Question at Issue
If economic policy is to commit itself to
supporting profitable dematerialization
then a pre-quantification of attainable economic
results is expedient. To this end the
Aachen Foundation Kathy Beys – whose
focus of work is dematerialization – has
commissioned a study whose results are
presented in this paper.
The question at issue of this study is:
What effects upon private sector turnover,
employment and public budgets arise if
the observable single-company efficiency
reserves of profitable dematerialization are
widely implemented in the national economy?
Scientific appraisals of the macroeconomic
effects of profitable dematerialization are
not yet available in Germany as far as the
authors are aware.
With regard to the similar processes of
single-company cost-neutral dematerialization
as well as profitable reduction of
cost factors other than material throughput
selected existing appraisals are summarised
below.
Appraisals of Single-Company Cost-
Neutral Dematerialization
In a study commissioned by Greenpeace,
the Prognos AG 5 examined the effects on
employment and growth of a singlecompany
cost-neutral dematerialization
through a shift of goods and services from
material-intensive to less materialintensive
forms of production or sectors.
5 Prognos AG, Mehr Arbeitsplätze durch ökologisches
Wirtschaften? Eine Untersuchung für
Deutschland, die Schweiz und Österreich, Gutachten
im Auftrag von Greenpeace, Hamburg 1999.
For instance, a shift of agricultural production
from conventional to biological farming
and a shift of transport from private to public
transport was modelled. The effects for
the year 2020 in Germany, Switzerland
and Austria were assessed using a combined
bottom-up and input-output model.
In sum, a reduction of material input by
25% as well as of non-renewable energy
sources by 30% in 2020 against the baseline
of 1990 led to slightly positive employment
effects in all three national
economies studied. For Germany the net
employment effect was over 160,000 new
jobs. Modelling came up with a neutral
effect on the gross domestic product
(GDP) of all three countries.
Meyer and Lutz 6 analysed the effects of
the increased input quota observable between
1980 and 1990 in so-called “other
market-determined services”, a heterogeneous
group in which, amongst others,
consultancy companies, engineering companies,
advertising agencies and cleaning
companies are merged. The effects are
determined by a comparison of actual developments
with simulated scenarios in a
complex econometric Pantha Rhei model
that consists of about 50,000 equations, is
deeply disaggregated by sector and
whose parameters have been estimated
econometrically on the basis of developments
between 1978 and 1994. One of
these scenarios describes de facto the
increase of material input by 10% with a
concomitant identical input reduction value
in “other market-determined services”.
This cost-neutral deterioration of material
efficiency reduces GDP in the 1980-1990
time span by 2.3% and the wage bill by
2.4% with a slight increase in employment
growth (0.2%).
These results suggest single-company
cost-neutral dematerialization can achieve
clearly positive effects upon GDP and the
wage bill while only slightly positive or
negative employment effects. Similar re-
6 Meyer, B. and C. Lutz, Ökoeffiziente Dienstleistungen
und Materialverbrauch. Eine Simulationsstudie
mit dem disaggregierten Modell PHANTA RHEI,
in Hinterhuber, F. and H. Schnabl (eds.), Arbeit –
Umwelt – Wachstum. Nachhaltigkeitsaspekte des
sektoralen Strukturwandels, Norderstedt 2002, pp.
190-228.
3