Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 594: Assessing the Potentials of Bioeconomy Sectors in Poland Employing Input-Output Modeling (Sustainability)

Bioeconomy emerges under major current global challenges, both environmental and economic, that are related to the existence and use of bio-based resources; in this context, policy stakeholders and scientists seek and propose potential solutions. Bioeconomy is among the discussed strategies with the potential to offer solutions. In this framework, bioeconomy`s importance increased over the last several years, thus it is essential to identify and monitor its role and significance in an economy and assess its potentials and intersectoral relationships. In this framework, the current study, through a general equilibrium analysis, aims to identify the sectors that are related to the bioeconomy and assess their potential in the Polish economy as such quantitative studies do not exist in the literature for Poland. For doing so, an Input-Output model was built, identifying initially the bioeconomy sectors and, afterwards, estimating their linkage coefficients in order to capture their direct and indirect impacts on the Polish economy. Results indicate that the fully bio-based sectors, such as the agriculture and food sectors, have higher potentials to induce knock-on effects in the economy than the mixed bio-based sectors. Thus, the current study`s results can offer important information to policy makers for decision making, such as in the case of planning development in any mixed bio-based sectors, such as biofuels or biogas.