Decomposition of Air Pollution Emissions from Swedish Manufacturing

Starting from the '90s, Swedish manufacturing output has been constantly growing, while emissions of some major air pollutants have been declining. This paper decomposes manufacturing pollution emissions to identify the forces associated with the abatement. It uses a newly available dataset on actual annual emissions from Swedish manufacturing and creates an index of emission intensities for the major local air pollutants to directly estimate the technique effect for the period 2007--2017. The results suggest that the main driver of the clean-up was improvements in emission intensities, while the composition of output actually moved towards more pollution-intensive goods. In the absence of changes in scale and technique, manufacturing pollution emissions would have increased in a range between 3 per cent (particulate matter) and 20 per cent (non-methane volatile compounds) between 2007 and 2017.