Macro- and socioeconomic indicators for technology assessment: Methods and case studies

A multidimensional impact assessment makes it possible to assess the strengths and weaknesses of technology variants in relation to various indicators and to incorporate this knowledge into decisions on private or public investments. Although methods to quantify microeconomic and environmental impacts have been established for a long time, there are only few approaches to assess macroeconomic or socioeconomic impacts of individual technologies in a robust way. This paper therefore presents a new method on how macroeconomic indicators such as employment effects, value added, the competitiveness of national industry on the world market, and geopolitical risks can be calculated for individual technologies, based on established methods for quantifying macroeconomic indicators at the level of the economy as a whole. In addition, new methods are being developed to determine socioeconomic indicators such as transaction costs (non-monetary), opportunities for financial participation, and perceived risks and barriers. It is noticeable here that it is often not enough to rely purely on technological features to quantify the indicators; surveys, for example, must also be used. All indicators were developed in a co-design process together with stakeholders from research, industry and civil society, which, among other things, guarantees the relevance and practicality of the indicators. The newly developed indicators were tested using case studies from the areas of mobility, heating, and electricity generation. The results show that the macro- and socioeconomic indicators presented here allow integrating important new perspectives into a multidimensional impact assessment or a multi-criteria decision analysis. As these perspectives have often been neglected to date, the new indicators presented here represent new and valuable additions to multidimensional impact assessment of energy and transport technologies.