Government expenditures on environmental protection and resource management

Abstract

This document presents the results and work undertaken in the pilot study on environmental expenditure by the general government according to Eurostat grant agreement no. 05121.2013.003-2013.343.

The main objective of this pilot study has been to develop a method for identifying general government expenditure for environmental protection and resource management, as well as developing a method for identifying these expenditures on an annual basis in order to meet the reporting requirements for EU-regulation 538/2014 amending EU-regulation 691/2011 on European environmental economic accounts.

The objectives of this pilot study were reached by adopting new methods in the classification of environmental expenditure by the general government.

Since the COFOG classification is an established classification in the Norwegian statistical system a new system was developed and designed alongside COFOG to recognise environmental expenditures by the general government in all COFOG divisions. All environmental expenditures were in the pilot study classified by environmental domain using the CEPA and CReMA classifications.

To comply with new regular reporting requirements on environmental economic accounting from the year 2017 an annual production process plan was developed.