Material Flow Accounting and Analysis enables the quantification of the metabolism of modern societies in physical terms.
Material Flow Accounting and Analysis is carried out on all levels of socio-economic activities: On the micro or product level, the level of economic sectors, the regional level, the macro or national level and the global level.

The macro level
The main purposes of economy-wide material flow accounts and balances are to:

• provide insights into the overall structure and development of the physical metabolism of societies and economies and its development in a long time series;
• derive a small set of highly aggregated indicators for resource use, including in the context of the EU-level initiative on Headline Indicators.
• permit analytical uses, in particular estimation of material and land use induced by imports (including indirect ('hidden') material flows) as well as decomposition analyses separating technological, structural and final demand changes.

The national level
The objective of national material flow balances is to understand the material throughput of a national economy and its material exchange with the environment. In order to analyse this "metabolism" of a national economy one should account the material inputs and outputs in total. Due to the "law of conservation of matter" the final amount of wastes and emissions is ultimately determined by the magnitude of inputs as far as the inputs are not stored within the anthroposphere (i.e. national economy).

The regional level
The domestic material flow account or material flow balance comprises the physical mass balance of the domestic extraction from the environment, the domestic deposition and release to the environment, the imports, and the exports.

The global level
If the possible impacts by material flows induced by a national economy are to be evaluated in a global context (and this seems indispensable with respect to sustainability), then the global material flows interlinked with the national production and consumption must be accounted for. The transnational extension of the domestic flow account is a necessary prerequisite in order to evaluate real progress towards sustainability.