Box 26A Data sources and country groupings

In many cases data relating specifically to household consumption and emissions are not available. Households per se have not always been identified as a key sector by compilers of socio-economic and, particularly, environmental data. Information on households is, therefore, often included as part of a larger category (because it often cannot be identified separately).

Energy data are most often presented as combined figures for the domestic, commercial and service sectors, and these can be difficult to disaggregate because of the differing ways in which the various sectors are defined. Energy data for East Germany are included in Central Europe in this chapter, being pre-1991.

Socio-economic data may also pose problems of interpretation and comparison; for example, data on Central and Eastern Europe are often gathered under different categories from EU and EFTA countries, making comparisons problematic. Also the severe currency fluctuations in 1992­93 and the different structure of the former centrally planned economies can make statistics relating to GNP (or GMP in the case of Central and Eastern countries) and spending difficult to interpret. Trends in population growth and trends in household size and structure and car ownership present fewer problems (see, eg, Euromonitor, 1992). Data for these parameters include East Germany in the EU group, as this is how the data were reported in the original Euromonitor source.

The country groupings used in this chapter to present data are as in Chapters 19, 20 and 21: EU, EFTA, Western, Central, former USSR and Central and Eastern Europe (see Box 19B).