Environmental efficiency in carbon dioxide emissions in the OECD: A non-parametric approach

Abstract

The role of the environment is an important issue in the policy-making and hence, the accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. In this paper, an environmental efficiency index is developed for the OECD countries using non-parametric techniques. The approach adopted is based on the assumption that there is just one production process behind the production of both goods and pollution emissions. The index derived in this work measures the extent of the required output sacrifice, due to the transformation of the production process, from one where all outputs are strongly disposable to the one which is characterized by weak disposability of pollutants. Using this index, we first conduct cross-section comparisons on the state of each country's production process in its treatment of pollution emissions. We then trace each country's modification of their production processes overtime. The results indicate that if the disposability for CO2 emissions were strictly restricted as the result of an environmental regulation, the total value of output loss to the OECD countries as a whole would correspond to 3.7, 4.8 and 3.5% of the total OECD GDP for 1980, 1985 and 1990, respectively. © 2000 Academic Press

A conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency: Evidence from UK regions

“…Several scholars following the modeling principle by Färe et al (1989), for country level studies have examined the relationship between economic growth and environmental performance (Zaim and Taskin, 2000a, 2000b, 2000cTaskin and Zaim, 2001;Zofio and Prieto, 2001;Zaim, 2004;Managi, 2006;Yörük and Zaim, 2006;Picazo-Tadeo and García-Reche, 2007;Halkos and Tzeremes, 2009). These studies are based on the works of Selden and Song (1994) and Grossman and Krueger (1995) and Simar (2005and Simar ( , 2006 which is based on conditional measures of a probabilistic approach of efficiency measures.…”

Impact of Environmental Regulation and Technical Progress on Industrial Carbon Productivity: An Approach Based on Proxy Measure

“…First, the importance of improving carbon productivity was highlighted. The loss of environmental efficiency directly leads to the total value of output loss among OECD countries [3]. As the growth rate of CO 2 emissions is negatively correlated with carbon productivity improvement, thus to reduce carbon emissions facilitates enhancement of carbon productivity [4].…”

Convergence in global environmental performance: assessing heterogeneity

“…Our focus in this paper is to propose to use a simple but relevant theory for measuring EP, that is based on production theory, inspired by recent work that includes: Färe et al (2006), Zaim and Taskin (2000), Zofio and Prieto (2001), Zaim (2004), Zhou et al (2006) and Picazo-Tadeo and García-Reche (2007), and further test for conditional beta convergence 1 in environmental performance. Therefore, our paper makes three key contributions to the literature.…”