As is known, the Kyoto protocol proposes to reinforce national policies for emission reduction and, furthermore, to cooperate with other contracting parties. In this context, it would be necessary to assess these emissions, both in general and specifically, by pollutants and/or among productive sectors. The objective of this paper is precisely to estimate the polluting emissions of industrial origin in Catalonia in the year 2001, in a multivariate context that explicitly allows a distinction to be made between the polluter and/or the productive sector causing this emission. Six pollutants are considered, four directly related to greenhouse effect. A multi-level model, with two levels, pollutants and productive sectors, was specified. Both technological progress and elasticity of capital were introduced as random effects. Hence, it has been permitted that these coefficients vary according to one or the other level. The most important finding in this paper is that elasticity of capital has been estimated as very non-elastic, with a range that varies between 0.162 (the paper industry) and 0.556 (commerce). In fact, and generally speaking, greater the capital in the sector, lower the elasticity of capital estimated. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.