Environmental Protection Goods – Defining the Scope

The report documents the creation of a new list of goods that are (capable of being) used for environmental and climate protection purposes. This list of potential environmental protection goods is based on the German official nomenclature of goods for production statistics 2009 (GP 2009). This list forms the basis for detailed analyses of the structure and development of the production and international trade of potential environmental protection goods. We employ Eurostat’s and OECD’s approaches for systematization, special evaluation of the German production and foreign trade statistic as well as a comparison with other internationally used lists to identify goods which could serve environmental and climate protection due to their way of functioning. In total, the new list of potential environmental protection goods comprises 254 items of the German production statistic that can be converted into the nomenclature of foreign trade statistic in order to examine the international competitiveness of the German environmental protection industry.