Environmental impact of consumption by Czech households: hybrid input–output analysis linked to household consumption data

We quantify direct and indirect emissions resulting from Czech household consumption contributing to climate change, acidification and smog formation. We develop a hybrid environmentally extended input-output model that links the single-region input-output analysis on domestic processes with a multiregional input-output analysis to derive the indirect emissions associated with imports and part of the domestic production. We apply Almon’s algorithm to transform the domestic emissions from industries to product groups. The indirect and direct emission intensities of more than hundred consumption items are then linked to expenditures of almost 3000 individual households to compute the total emissions for each household. We find that emissions attributable to households are not distributed evenly – while the first expenditure decile of households is responsible for less than 4% of all emissions, the tenth decile is responsible for 20-24%. Consumption of services and goods are least emission intensive, while use of electricity, heating, and transportation remain responsible for major part of emissions. The most important factor of emissions attributable to household consumption is total expenditures; the expenditure elasticity of emissions is about 0.8, but we identify consumption groups which emissions are less sensitive to total expenditures (electricity, heating and food) and more sensitive (transportation, goods).