Environmental protection expenditure – Years 2016-2022

Istat releases the time series on environmental protection expenditure (2016-2022) on the data warehouses IstatData and I.Stat ‘National accounts’ theme, ‘Environmental accounts\Environmental protection expenditure’ sub-theme.  

The environmental protection expenditure account (Epea) measures how much Households, Corporations and General Government spend to purchase environmental protection (EP) services, the investments carried out by producers of EP services for the market and the whole amount of expenditure carried out for own account EP activities. Included are net transfers for environmental protection to the rest of the world.

Epea transactions are classified according to classes (or grouping of classes) of the Classification of Environmental Protection Activities:

• “protection of ambient air and climate”;
• “wastewater management”;
• “waste management”;
• “protection and remediation of soil, groundwater and surface water”;
• “noise and vibration abatement”;
• “protection of biodiversity and landscapes”;
• “protection against radiation, environmental research and development, other activities”.

In addition to classifying the institutional sector carrying out the expenditure – General Government, Corporations, Households – Epea also identifies the role of each sector in pursuing environmental safeguard:

• producer of EP services;
• user of EP goods and services;
• beneficiary or source (in the case of General Government) of transfers for environmental protection.

Epea also allows for the calculation of national expenditure for environmental protection (NEEP) which is defined as the sum of:

• final uses of EP services by resident units;
• intermediate consumption of EP services by resident units (except those for the production of EP services);
• gross fixed capital formation for environmental protection activities, transfers for environmental protection which are not a counterpart of previous items less financing by the Rest of the world.

Data derived from the account, calculated on the basis of European standards for monetary environmental accounts, are consistent with national accounts concepts and principles (ESA 2010) and can be directly compared with macroeconomic aggregates, namely GDP, investments, intermediate and final consumption.

The main data sources are national accounts – primarily Supply and Use tables and General Government expenditure by function accounts – as well as data on enterprises’ environmental protection expenditure collected through the Survey on Economic and financial accounts of large enterprises and the Survey on small and medium enterprises.

The February 2025 release incorporates innovations and improvements in methods and data sources, ensuring consistency with the general revision of national accounts carried out in September 2024, ten years after the adoption of ESA 2010. Due to the data revision, the new time series cannot be compared with previous ones, available within the ‘National accounts’ theme, sub-theme National Accounts – 2019 version and National Accounts – 2014 version of IstatData until the complete data transfer into the latter.

For information
Final demand, labour and capital input, environmental accounts Division

Angelica Tudini
tel. +39 06 4673.3136
tudini@istat.it