1.2 Review of the bioeconomy

The bioeconomy sector’s output, value added and exports have grown and the number of people it employs has remained at the same level after Finland’s Bioeconomy Strategy was published in 2014. In 2019, the bioeconomy output was EUR 74.4 billion and the value added was EUR 26 billion, whereas in 2014 the output was EUR 62.6 billion and the value added was EUR 21 billion at current prices. The bioeconomy accounted for 16 per cent of the total national output and 13 per cent of the value added. In the 2010s, the output and value added generated by the bioeconomy’s different areas have changed at almost the same rate as those of the national economy on average.

Bioeconomy products account for about one third of Finland’s goods exports. Within the bioeconomy, forest products alone account for more than 70 per cent of the value of bioeconomy exports. In 2019, exports of bioeconomy products totalled EUR 18.8 billion.

In 2019, the bioeconomy sectors employed a total of 301,800 people, or 11 per cent of the total number of people employed in Finland. Outsourcing, automation and mechanisation in both industry and agriculture also complicate the temporal comparability of statistics in monitoring the overall impacts of changes.