Competitive Bioeconomy? Comparing Bio-based and Non-bio-based Primary Sectors of the World.

Bioeconomy as a political-economic concept proposes the replacement of fossil resources by bio-based resources in order to address climate change mitigation and counteract resource depletion. The aim of this paper is to figure out how competitiveness across primary sectors, i.e. sector A, bio-based agriculture , forestry and fishing , and sector B, non-bio-based mining and quarrying , is distributed across geographical regions and how it changes over time. A constant market share analysis based upon sectoral output data (2000–2014) shows that competition for market share was significantly lower in sector A than in sector B across 43 countries and one rest of the world country group (ROW), consisting mainly of smaller non-European economies. As a long-term trend, ROW gained market share in both sectors but with a much higher magnitude in sector B, from Europe, the USA, China and other countries. At times when world growth was negative or near zero (2009 and around 2013), ROW substantially lost market share in sector B with respect to the other regions mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]