A literature study for DEA applied to energy and environment

Self Cite

Natural and managerial disposability are two important strategic concepts, whose priorities are economic prosperity and environmental protection, respectively. This study defines social sustainability as the simultaneous achievement of economic prosperity and environmental protection, and then assesses the degree of social sustainability across provinces in China. In addition, this study combines the concepts of natural and managerial disposability with Data Envelopment Analysis window analysis. The method allows for frontier shifts among different time periods and thus can provide more stable and reliable results. This method is applied to assess the energy and environmental performances across the provinces of China during [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014], and provides detailed information about provincial variations, which are valuable and important to policy makers (especially for those in local governments). This study identifies three important findings. First, there were no significant improvements in China's environmental performance during the analysis periods, since, historically, the governments have not paid enough attention to environmental protection. Second, there are increasing trends in the provincial gaps regarding the environmental performance. In this regard, the central government should help the poor provinces to protect the environment. Third, there are significant differences between the results obtained under natural disposability and those obtained under managerial disposability, since they have different priorities regarding the operational and the environmental performances. Thus, significant contributions can be made by eco-technology progress combined with managerial performance improvements by business leaders and policy makers. This can be a new policy direction for the Chinese government.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Sustainability of Provinces in China: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Window Analysis under the Concepts of Natural and Managerial Disposability

Sueyoshi

Yuan

et al. 2017

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“…Since its introduction, DEA has been extensively employed in economic analysis to calculate measures of efficiencies in various situations and industries, such as transportation [29,31,32], government and public sector [33][34][35], public utilities [21,22,[36][37][38], healthcare [39][40][41], education [42,43], banking and finance [44,45], energy and environmental studies [46][47][48][49][50][51][52], manufacturing and information technology [53][54][55][56].…”

Section: Dea Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficiency, Conflicting Goals and Trade-Offs: A Nonparametric Analysis of the Water and Wastewater Service Industry in Italy

Storto

2018

This paper presents a benchmarking study of the water and wastewater industry in Italy. A three-stage modeling approach was implemented to measure the efficiency of 53 utility operators. This approach is based on the implementation of network and conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) to model the production process of the water service utility operators. In comparison to the conventional black-box or one-stage production model generally adopted in previous studies, the proposed approach provides information relative to the different efficiency components of the stages and blocks of the water service production process and its overall efficiency. Further, by shifting the efficiency analysis to a two-dimensional performance space, i.e., resource and market-efficiency, it offers a more comprehensive view of the water service industry and allows accounting for different business goals at the same time and for an investigation of industry trade-offs. Results show that the operators' efficiencies in the Italian water service industry are generally variable and low. There are no water service utilities which are 100% efficient from the resource-efficiency perspective, and the maximum efficiency score is 0.545. Efficiency measurements suggest that there is a general orientation of the Italian water industry to not invest in upgrading and improving the infrastructure assets, and achieving an acceptable efficiency in the operations is critical to delivering water services to market in an efficient way. Only one utility operator is 100% efficient from the market-efficiency perspective. The low tariffs adopted by the water service operators do not allow the gaining of satisfactory service remuneration and the achievement of long-term business sustainability. The joint analysis of the resource and market efficiency scores indicates that there is a trade-off between the corresponding business goals.

“…For each DMU, an efficiency score bounded between 0 and 1 is computed relative to the best practice on the frontier. In recent years, DEA has been extensively applied to the assessment of sustainability performance and various models have been proposed [26]. This paper intends to evaluate the unified efficiency of the DMUs under natural and managerial disposability respectively.…”

Section: Efficiency and Malmquist Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The approaches have been applied to countries, cities, industrial sectors, facilities, and companies [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Refer to [26] for a comprehensive review of research in this aspect. Of particular relevance to our research are studies on environmental performance of energy companies.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon Emission Performance of Independent Oil and Natural Gas Producers in the United States

Wang

2018

Abstract:The oil and natural gas producers have undergone a lot of pressures to curb their carbon emissions as part of the global efforts to address the climate change problem. This paper aims to examine the carbon emission performance of a set of independent oil and natural gas producers in the United States for the period 2011-2015. For each producer, we manually collect its drilling, oil production and gas production data from the annual reports, and extract the carbon emissions data from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP). We develop empirical models based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach and the Malmquist index measurement. The proposed DEA models generate unified efficiency scores to capture the carbon emission performance under natural disposability and managerial disposability respectively. Then the DEA-based Malmquist indexes are derived to measure the change of carbon emission performance over time. We are able to identify climate leaders and laggards among the producers. Furthermore, we find that the performance has improved from 2012 to 2015 under natural disposability. Under managerial disposability, the indexes exhibit significantly greater dispersions than the indexes under natural disposability, and there is an industry-wide loss of efficiency in terms of technical change. The sustainable development of the independent oil and gas producers requires them to invest more in emission mitigation measures, such as energy conservation, leak detection and repair, flaring reduction, and even renewable energy.