Valuing both the environment and the changes in the level of environmental quality is of central importance to environmental policy formulation, as it puts the costs of obtaining certain environmental goals into perspective. In this article, which was published in the December 2008 issue of "Ökologisches Wirtschaften", Holger Gerdes and Anneke von Raggamby propose a methodology to assess the policy impacts of environmental valuations.

For a sustainable development within the EU all social costs of economic activities have to be considered. The integrated project EXIOPOL aims to assess these costs, which include environmental impacts, for the EU-25 and will depict them in an environmentally extended input-output framework. The results of the assessment and the accounting framework will be applied to important policy issues and will help to assess the policy impact of past research.