Household Metabolism in the Five Cities.

years old, and 54 % of them participated (SCB, 1998). We obtained the computer file
containing data for all these households from Statistics Sweden and found 85
households who lived in Stockholm city.
The categories of the Swedish Family Expenditure Survey are presented in Appendix
6. All EAP analyses emanate from those categories. In total, there are 298 expenditure
categories: 76 concerning food and drinks, 15 concerning non-durable goods and 28
concerning clothing and footwear. Some of the expenditure categories are aggregated.
An example is Meal and flour. It is difficult to make an analysis of that category in
EAP, because it includes items as different as wheat flour, flour mixes for cakes, rice
and pasta, all with different consumer prices, ingredients and transportation distances.
For those aggregated categories, we made several separate analyses in EAP.
Information about how much is consumed of each item in the category was gathered
from trade associations or from information about import and export (SCB 2002b,
1997a) and domestic production. These data indicate the Swedish consumption, which
supposedly does not differ much from the consumption in Stockholm. For some
categories no data could be found, and in those cases an educated guess had to be
made (see Appendix 6).
Some of the budget expenditure survey categories are also quite detailed, and for a
number of these categories the same analysis could be used. For example this was the
case for milk, where the Family expenditure survey has three different kinds of milk;
but also for garden tools, which were assumed to be equal to tools; or different kinds
of insurances, which all were assumed to have the same energy intensity.
For some expenditure categories, it has been hard to find out how much and what
types of basic goods that are commonly used for producing the items to be analysed.
If the spending on this category is low, as for example is the case with other printed
paper, the energy intensity has been assumed to be the same as a similar category, in
this case books, although the items are not exactly the same. For different kinds of
furniture it was hard to tell the average weight and composition. It was, however,
possible to find out from import statistics (SCB, 2002b) the price per kg of furniture
and the division between furniture made of wood, metal and synthetic materials. Thus
furniture could more easily be calculated as one category.
Several assumptions have been made with reference to the budget survey expenditure
categories, either by splitting them up when we analysed the energy intensity, or by
aggregating them. We discovered that a rather large part of the total energy of an item
analysed in EAP often comes from manufacturing and trade and service. With this in
mind, we assumed that changes in the composition of basic goods would not make
any major difference to the total outcome when we dealt with goods produced in the
same manufacturing sector and sold in the same stores.
Consumer prices and consumer taxes
Consumer prices for 1995 were gathered from the following sources (see further
Appendix 6):
From Statistics Sweden, we obtained a file on average consumer prices during 1995
for 87 of the items in the budget survey (SCB, 2001a). The consumer prices of
another 17 items have been found in SCB (1997b).
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