Box 20A Data availability and country groups

Some general data are available for describing 'industry' or 'manufacturing industry' as a whole. There are many data on production, employment and trade flows in various industrial sectors, and some limited data are available which cover the types of resources (raw materials, energy and water) used by the sectors. Such data are published by, for example, the European Commission (CEC, 1991), the Nordic Council of Ministers (1992), and the UN system (eg, UNECE, 1992; UN, 1990). Sources of data for Central and Eastern European countries include national reports submitted to the 1992 UNCED conference, and the Eurostat/Statistisches Bundesamt (E/SB) report on Central and Eastern Europe, and other parts of the former USSR (E/SB, 1991).

It is also possible to describe trends in energy use by industry as a whole. Total energy consumption and consumption by fuel type are available for most European countries. However, disaggregated information on energy use by specific industrial sector is available for only a few countries.

Data on emissions (to air and water, generation of waste) which have a potential environmental impact are scarce (see Chapters 14 and 15). Information about the types of substances arising from various processes can be found, although this is often qualitative, and not generally monitored by national authorities at the sector level. A few countries ­ eg, The Netherlands (VROM, 1991) ­ have made progress towards development of integrated emissions inventories, which enable estimations to be made of contribution by industrial activities of emissions to air and water (see Chapter 14). Some examples of emissions trends in specific industrial sectors are available from company or industry reports. Results concerning improvements in environmental performance are available, but data showing that emissions to the environment are increasing are much harder to come by (see the section on industry response to environmental factors later in this chapter).

As explained in Chapter 15, statistics on waste are particularly unreliable and national estimates of the amount of industrial waste (especially hazardous waste) generated have a wide margin of error. Data on soil and groundwater pollution differ sharply between regions in detail and reliability (see Chapters 5 and 7).

The country groupings used in this chapter are as for Chapter 19: EU, EFTA, Western, Central, former USSR, Central and Eastern Europe ­ see Box 19B.