DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15689391
title: EXIOBASE 3

description: EXIOBASE 3: For best in class environmental-economic accounting data. Get insight into global supply-chains and the environmental impacts of consumption.

EXIOBASE 3 provides a time series of environmentally extended multi-regional input‐output (EE MRIO) tables ranging from 1995 to 2020 (plus now-casted tables for 2021 and 2022) for 44 countries (27 EU member plus 17 major economies) and five rest of the world regions.

EXIOBASE is maintained by the EXIOBASE consortium, with XIO Sustainability Analytics now working on providing annual updates to the core economic, energy and emission tables. We welcome any collaborative efforts to further improve the database.

Updates are now being produced annually, and more updated data may be available in beta-mode, get in contact if interested. At time of publication of v3.9.4, a version 3.10 with updates to 2022 and nowcasts to 2024 is in beta.

A special issue of Journal of Industrial Ecology (Volume 22, Issue 3) describes the build process and some use cases of EXIOBASE 3. This includes the article by Stadler et al. (2018) describing the compilation of EXIOBASE 3. 

To stay updated on database improvements, relevant EXIOBASE studies, and ongoing work, join the EXIOBASE group on LinkedIn. 

Licenses

Please ensure that you have understood the license conditions before use. Note that these conditions are significantly different to the license conditions of earlier versions, such as v3.8.  

Non-commercial, academic useEXIOBASE v3.9 is released under a customized derivative of the CC-BY-SA-NC license, incorporating additional definitions as outlined in the license file.  

 

Commercial useCommercial licenses, which allow for use for any case not covered in the non-commercial license are under development. For license enquiries or help in use of EXIOBASE data for spend-based emission factors, or other applications, please send an email.

 

The funding to be accumulated through licenses and support will be used to fund further updates of the database.

Now-casting

The core EXIOBASE 3.9 model is based on supply and use tables up to 2020. However, the time-series is expanded (i.e., now-casted) until 2022 using global trade data and macroeconomic data (IMF), as well as environmental data when available. Caution should be made when using now-casted data, especially due to the impact of the COVID pandemic not being adequately captured in the now-casting. It is recommended to use 2020 data from v3.9.4 as the latest available year for most analysis.

Capital endogenisation

Capital use matrices are estimated as an auxiliary dataset to these tables. They can be found at Capital use matrices for v3.8.2 and will be shortly updated for more recent versions. In the interim, it is recommended to use the coefficient form of that dataset for any work that requires capital endogenisation for v3.9.

Processing the database

For a general introduction to environmentally extended input-output modelling, we refer to:  



UN Handbook on Supply and Use Tables and Input Output-Tables with Extensions and Applications

Input-Output Analysis by Miller & Blair 


The database is too large to handle in a standard spreadsheet software (e.g., Excel), and we recommend using programming languages such as Python, R, or Matlab. The open-source python package PyMRIO can be used to download and parse the database directly from Zenodo and do input-output analysis.

If you are interested in learning more about EXIOBASE or input-output modelling in general (including practical use of PyMRIO, how to develop custom models), please reach out.

Earlier versions and documentation

Some previous versions (3.7, 3.8) are also available on Zenodo. The even earlier public releases of the data (EXIOBASE v3.3 and v3.4) are available on request. We recommend, however, using the latest version due to significant updates of the economic data as well as major differences in water and land use accounts. 

The first documentation of EXIOBASE 3 was done via deliverables of the DESIRE project - these can now be accessed here.

The country disaggregated version, EXIOBASE 3rx, is available on Zenodo. It is no longer continued, but including more regions in the EXIOBASE classification is ongoing work. Reach out to exiobase-support@googlegroups.com, if interested in collaboration on integrating specific countries. 

Future Updates and Announcements

Updates are now being produced annually, and a beta version of 3.10 is already under development, extending most data to 2022. To stay updated, join the EXIOBASE group on LinkedIn and/or reach out to exiobase-support@googlegroups.com. 
description: Changelog

v3.9.6 - Release in June 2025

Minor update for bug fixing in

- Employment accounts

Economic IO tables and other accounts are the same as in 3.9.4 and 3.9.5

v3.9.5 - Release in February 2025

Minor update for bug fixing in

- Material extensions- Land extensions

Economic IO tables and other accounts are the same as in 3.9.4

v3.9.4 - Release in January 2025

+ Emissions fully updated to incorporate now-cast fuel combustion to 2021 and full update of non-fuel combustion based on PRIMAP. + Fixed issues in methane non-combustion.+ Updates land and employment accounts+ Finalization of new licensing arrangements.+ Removed Unused Domestic Extraction values+ Include all internal changes listed below since 3.8.2

v3.9.3 Internal release in October 2023

+ Emissions debugging for non-fuel combustion. 

v3.9.2 Internal release in August 2023

+ Updated procedure for estimation of energy and fuel-combustion emissions accounts.+ Incorporated use of energy accounts in SUT estimation.+ Included SUTs in pre-scaling procedure in order to have aggregate SUTs (from FIGARO) for the time-series to 2020.+ Updated other data to 2020 end year.

v3.9.0 Internal beta release in February 2022

+ Major update to SUT balancing routine+ Updated of most data sources to 2019 end year.+ Fixed a bug in the breakdown of equal coefficient when using the provided (historic) SUT data - affected some detailed coefficient data (loss of information)+ Specified no production of solar thermal, wind, geothermal, wave by most industries (i.e., auto-producers are not present in those industries).

The update from v3.8 to v3.9 includes an update of the underlying SUT data to 2020, inclusion of energy data in the balancing procedure (see Rasul et al. 2024), and updated satellite accounts (energy, emissions, land, employment, material). v3.9.4 includes a number of improvements to the energy products in the SUT and the non-combustion emissions compared to earlier versions of 3.9. Please note that Unused Extraction Data is no longer included in the material data and that the license file has been updated. The structure of the satellite accounts has been changed, as described below in the Repository Content section.
description: Repository content and structure 

The table below provides an overview of main elements of EXIOBASE and the groups of satellite accounts available.






 










Name 









Short description 









Reference 









Latest data year 











IO economic core









 Economic MRIO tables









Wood et al. (in progress) &  Stadler et al. (2018) 









2020 











Air emissions  (Non-combustion) 









Non-combustion emissions accounts based on the PRIMAP database.  









Stadler et al. (2018) 









2022 











Air emissions (combustion) 









Combustion emissions accounts based on the energy use accounts. 









Rasul et al. (2024) & Stadler et al. (2018) 









2020 











Energy 









Energy use accounts based on IEA World Energy Balances.  









Rasul et al. (2024) 









2020 











Land









Land use accounts based on FAOSTAT. 









Wood et al. (in progress) & Stadler et al. (2018) 









2021 











Nutrients 









P and N releases 









Stadler et al. (2018) 









2011 











Water 









Water consumption and withdrawals 









Stadler et al. (2018) 









2011 











Material









Used domestic extraction 









Stadler et al. (2018) 




 









2022 











Employment









People and hours worked 









Stadler et al. (2018) 




 









2022 











Factor inputs 









Value Added 









Stadler et al. (2018) 









2020 











Updating the extensions is ongoing work, but we welcome any collaborative efforts. 


Naming



IOT_YYYY_ixi.zip – MRIO archive for year YYYY in industry by industry format.

IOT_YYYY_pxp.zip – MRIO archive for year YYYY in product by product format.

hashes.csv – MD5 and SHA256 hash codes for all zip file.






Content of each zip archive
This section explains the nomenclature used in each IOT*.zip archive. Note: the archive can be read directly by PyMRIO without unpacking. 

 

The economic core (provided in current, basic prices, millions EUR) is stored in the root of the archive, containing:



A.txt – Matrix/inter-industry coefficients (direct requirements matrix).

Y.txt – Final demand.

x.txt – Gross/total output.

unit.txt – Units of the flow data.


The economic and environmental extension data is provided in a set of subfolders:



air_emissions

employment

energy

factor_inputs

materials

land

nutrients

water


Each of these contains:



F.txt – Extensions for intermediate sectors.

F_Y.txt – Extensions for final demand.

unit.txt – Units for each extension. 


The variable naming follows common IO practice and is further outlined here. In previous version (EXIOBASE 3.8), numerous intermediate matrices/multipliers/stressors were included. These are no longer included to reduce storage space and make the database easier to handle. All of these intermediate accounts can be calculated using the open-source Python package PyMRIO.