During the last years, international experts have tried to model economic, labour and environmental consequences of implementing circular economy strategies at national and multiregional levels, making use of multiple scenarios. However, there is still a lack of consensus on the size of the impacts of this transition and on whether it will get the economies to a "win-win-win" situation for the three dimensions mentioned.

This paper revises more than 300 circular economy scenarios in the time frame 2020 to 2050, classifying them into moderate and ambitious, depending on the number of sectors they touch upon. For the changes in gross domestic product (GDP), job creation and CO2 emissions a meta-analysis is implemented. As main results, the authors found that by 2030, the implementation of ambitious scenarios could generate a "win-win-win" situation showing an average increase of 2% in GDP, 1.6% in job creation and a reduction of CO2 emissions of 24.6%.

There is still little understanding of the magnitude of potential socio-economic and environmental impacts of a transition to a circular economy at the macro-level (i.e. national, multinational or global scales). This is to great extent due to a lack of studies focused on the circular economy and its implications to society. Moreover, no published study has examined the interactions and trade-offs between social, macroeconomic and environmental impacts. The proper identification and modelling of those impacts could shed light to promote a cost-effective circular transition.

The authors focus on the literature at the macro-level for analysing the impacts of the circular transition. They group circularity interventions into four main types: closing supply chains, residual waste management, product lifetime extension, and resource efficiency. They conducted a literature review resulting in 595 publications that were eligible for the meta-analysis if the studies met all of the following 4 criteria: 1) the publication mentioned at least one intervention type; 2) at least one indicator (GDP, job creation or CO2 emissions) was quantified; 3) impacts were assessed with structural, macro-economic or integrated assessment models; 4) prospective scenarios were analysed from 2020 to 2050 in comparison with a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. The final list resulted in 27 publications, which accounted for 324 interventions.

The meta-analysis performed followed 3 steps: 1) extraction of numerical values and normalisation of circular interventions; 2) classification of circular interventions into moderate and progressive; 3) performing of statistical analyses including an assessment of correlation between the indicators. For the harmonisation and normalisation of numerical values the authors used the BAU scenarios reported by the different publications.