Ecological Economics 183 (2021) 106948 Available online 2 February 2021 0921-8009/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Analysis Material productivity, socioeconomic drivers and economic structures: A panel study for European regions Marco Bianchi a, b, * , Ikerne del Valle b , Carlos Tapia c a TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), Astondo Bidea, Edifcio700, E-48160 Derio, Bizkaia, Spain b Department of Applied Economics, University of the Basque Country, Avda. Lehendakari Agirre, 83, 48015 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain c Nordregio, International Research Centre for Regional Development and Planning, Box 1658, SE-111 86 Stockholm, Sweden A R T I C L E INFO Keywords Material productivity Regional productivity Domestic material consumption European regions Economic structures ABSTRACT This paper provides an empirical investigation on the effects that regional economic structures exert on the socioeconomic determinants of material productivity. To this aim, frst we develop a taxonomy of economic structures for more than 280 European regions that are classifed in four overarching groups: agriculture-, in- dustry-, intermediate- and service-based economies. Second, we perform a panel analysis to explore the impact of economic structures on the relationship between socioeconomic drivers and material productivity, during the period 2006–2015. Our results validate the basic hypothesis of the paper, i.e. the structural relationship between material productivity and its driving factors varies according to the underlying economic structures of the re- gions. In particular, we found that: (1) an increase in affuence leads to greater material productivity gains in material-intensive regions rather than in areas with service-oriented economies; (2) the degree of urban agglomeration seems to be the most important driver for material productivity, and its leverage effect is bigger among already densely populated regions. Our fndings suggest that the infuence of socioeconomic factors on material productivity behaves differently according to the idiosyncratic features that regions exhibit. Such di- versity translates into different needs and opportunities that local policies should address by adopting a place- based perspective. 1. Introduction Searching for sustainable modes of consumption and production represents the only way to meet an ever-increasing demand of goods without incurring in further environmental deterioration. The growing awareness that “business as usual” is both unwise and unsustainable has placed the role of the environment and the effcient use of natural re- sources at the centre of the political and economic debate (Domenech and Bahn-Walkowiak, 2019). Governments and international organi- zations are therefore encouraging the adoption of alternative production systems and more inclusive policy models in order to achieve a win-win outcome – a combined environmental and economic beneft (Akenji and Bengtsson, 2014; Steffen et al., 2015). One of the headline indicators that is systematically reported in empirical works and monitoring frameworks to track the progress towards more effcient and sustainable economies is Material Produc- tivity (MP). MP refers to the economic value extracted from each unit of material resource consumed and it is calculated as the ratio between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and an indicator of material consump- tion, generally Domestic Material Consumption (DMC). 1 The use of DMC as a denominator entails certain limitations that need to be recognised for the correct interpretation of the respective MP measure. Indeed, DMC does not consider hidden material fows related to the use of raw materials at upstream extraction and processing stages. This truncation might lead to wrong interpretations and misleading policy messages, as economies could reduce their DMC by relocating or outsourcing material-intensive activities such as extraction and manufacturing. In this sense, MP indicator frequently becomes more responsive to the structure and sectoral specialisation of a given economy than to its un- derlying capacity to consume materials in a more effcient and/or * Corresponding author at: TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), Astondo Bidea, Edifcio700, E-48160 Derio, Bizkaia, Spain. E-mail address: marco.bianchi@tecnalia.com (M. Bianchi). 1 DMC is calculated according to the Economic-Wide Material Flow Accounting (EW-MFA), a standardized methodology to quantify the amount of materials (i.e. biomass, metal ores, non-metallic minerals and fossil energy materials) directly used by an economy on a national or global scale. DMC is defned as the total annual quantity of raw material extracted from the domestic territory, plus all physical imports minus all physical exports (EUROSTAT, 2018). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.106948 Received 15 July 2020; Received in revised form 27 November 2020; Accepted 10 December 2020