The Economy-Wide Material Flow Analysis (EW-MFA) method has become one of the most widely used material accounting methods due to its development and adoption by Eurostat. European countries submit national material flow data to Eurostat using this well-documented accounting method. This has facilitated uptake by researchers, including academics in the field of urban sustainability. This method has also become known as the 'Eurostat method', and its main features are the inclusion of all of the physical material flows moving into or out of a system (thus the 'economy-wide' label). Data is captured at a fairly detailed level (e.g. bananas or limestone), but top-level indicators within this method aggregate at higher level groups (e.g. biomass or non-metallic minerals). Water flows are intentionally excluded, though, due to the difficulty in separating natural water cycles from human water cycles, as well as the tendency of these large volumes to obscure some of the indicators when grouped together with other flows. On an urban level this method has at times been modified slightly (e.g. Barles 2009).

Compared to more narrow MFAs or SFAs, this method has significant data requirements in order to capture the entire, economy-wide (or city-wide in case of urban studies) material flows. However, a more holistic picture of the city’s resources becomes available through this all-encompassing approach. Cities do remain a black box, and other methods are required to understand what happens inside this box.