From Industrial Ecology to Information Ecology: A Structural Economics Approach

Despite the rapid evolution of the information economy, industrial ecology is still dominated by studies of material flows and lacks a complete and thorough treatment of information flows. This weakness is preventing industrial ecology from providing more integrated environmental policy for the information age. In this paper, standard structural economics approaches, such as input-output modeling and structural decomposition analysis, are adopted to study the substitution of information for energy in the U.S. economies at state, regional, and national levels during the 1990s. The significance of this study is three-fold: 1) proposing a more holistic conceptual and methodological framework in which the intangible information flows can be explicitly analyzed together with the tangible material flows from a macroeconomics perspective; 2) promoting an structural economics approach to the conventional toolbox of industry ecology that will allow the analysis of the dynamic and complex interactions among material, energy, and information flows at various spatial scales, and 3) deriving policy lessons specially relevant to the long-term environmental impacts of the emerging information sectors.