Ask how big the bioeconomy is and you will get very different answers. Consultants talk in trillions per year. Government statisticians have no official number at all. This post lines up the credible estimates and asks why they disagree.

The short version: the best-documented US estimate comes in two sizes, and the forecasts are a different kind of number altogether.

What are the credible numbers?

Source: National Academies, Safeguarding the Bioeconomy (2020); BEA discussion paper (March 2023); McKinsey Global Institute, The Bio Revolution (2020). These numbers answer different questions and should not be added or compared directly.

View data

estimate	value
McKinsey potential, global, per year (high)	4000000000000
McKinsey potential, global, per year (low)	2000000000000
NASEM pilot estimate, US, 2016	959200000000
Value added cited by BEA, US, 2016	402500000000

Three kinds of number are on this chart.

A measured US estimate. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a pilot estimate for the US bioeconomy in 2016: $959.2 billion, or 5.1% of GDP. It also considered a scenario in which biobased processes replace traditional ones, which would reach 7.4% of GDP.

A second measured estimate. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, in a March 2023 paper on how to build a national measure, cites the same National Academies work for a different figure: value added of $402.5 billion in 2016, or 2.2% of GDP.

A forecast. McKinsey Global Institute estimated in 2020 that biological applications could have a direct economic impact of $2 trillion to $4 trillion per year over the next 10 to 20 years, with more than half outside human health. That is global, annual, and a potential, not something measured.

Why are there two US numbers?

We could not fully reconcile them from the sources we read, and we do not want to pretend otherwise. What the National Academies chapter does say is that the choice of measure matters. It discusses three ways to measure the bioeconomy, and it notes that for manufactured products the value added is less than half of the gross value of the products. A gap between $959 billion and $403 billion, a ratio of about 2.4, is the kind of gap that difference could produce. We did not confirm that this is the explanation.

The deeper point is that the bioeconomy is not a statistical category. Official accounts are built around industries, such as manufacturing or agriculture, and the bioeconomy cuts across them. Any estimate has to decide which part of a hybrid industry counts, and different reports decide differently. The National Academies definition focuses on biotechnology and includes only a specific set of crop products. The USDA, by contrast, counts biobased products by their content, and one analysis it cites puts the direct value added of the biobased products industry at $150 billion for 2017.

What should a reader do with this?

Treat any single "bioeconomy is worth X" figure as a statement about a definition. When you read one, ask three questions:

• Is it measured or projected?
• Is it gross value, value added, or something multiplied through the economy?
• Which industries are counted, and which are left out?

The McKinsey estimate and the National Academies estimate are not in conflict. They are not measuring the same thing, in the same place, over the same period.

Limits

We did not find an official government series for the bioeconomy and cannot rule out one that we missed. The McKinsey numbers come from the report as summarized in several public sources, and we could not access its full text. The two US numbers are for 2016 and are old. We did not update them for inflation or growth.

Sources

1. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Safeguarding the Bioeconomy, 2020, chapter on measurement frameworks: pilot estimate of 5.1% of GDP ($959.2 billion) with 2016 data and a 7.4% scenario.
2. Highfill and Chambers, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Developing a National Measure of the Economic Contributions of the Bioeconomy, March 2023: the $402.5 billion value-added figure (2.2% of GDP) and the USDA biobased products estimate.
3. McKinsey Global Institute, The Bio Revolution: Innovations transforming economies, societies, and our lives, May 2020.