At the request of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) in 2013 CE Delft carried out an initial, reference measurement of the magnitude of the Dutch biobased economy, covering the materials and chemicals industries as well as the energy sector. The results were laid down in the report ‘Economic radar of the biobased economy in the Netherlands’. This initial review was based on the sector where the biobased feedstock was produced as an intermediate (RVO, 2014), which meant that knock-on activities contracted out to other organisations by biobased-producing companies were not included. Examples include research and marketing, consultancy, upstream suppliers and downstream producers of end products.
At both the national and regional level there is a desire to chart these activities, too, for the purposes of policy estimation among other things. The present report is concerned with the economic significance of these ‘knock-on’ activities and also provides an overall picture of the scale and evolution of the entire biobased cluster over the period 2005-2013, taking 2011 as the reference year.