Measuring the blue economy in the EU: The Polish experience

Abstract

It is generally agreed that the blue economy and blue growth play important roles in the global economy; over the last few years, they have been widely discussed at both national and international levels. Nevertheless, there is a lack of consensus on how to measure them, as the accounting methodologies differ between studies, implying divergent results. This article summarizes previous studies by comparing blue economy accounting methodologies and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Based on the comparison, a new methodology is proposed, based primarily on micro- and country-specific local data; this new methodology has been applied to measure the size of the blue economy in Poland. The results show that previous analyses have slightly underestimated the size of the blue economy in Poland, despite similarities concerning general dynamics and sectoral structure over time. The study concludes that a trade-off exists between using existing one-size-fits-all methods and country-specific methods, with a more precise, tailored approach being achieved at the expense of the accuracy of cross-country comparisons. Finally, the study highlights that, as there is no unambiguous solution to the problem of the above trade-off, different methods should be used with regard to the choice of method depends on the specific research task to be carried out or policy question to be addressed.