Heterogeneous technologies, strategic groups and environmental efficiency technology gaps for European countries

An analysis of Spain's global and environmental efficiency from a European Union perspective

“…The first input is total employment, which is people who worked at least one hour for pay or profit during the reference week or were temporarily absent from such work (in thousands of people, Eurostat) (this input is used in Menegaki, 2013;Woo et al, 2015;Kounetas, 2015;Makridou et al, 2016). The second input is the energy consumption, which is gross inland consumption (in thousands of Toe, Eurostat) (this input is used in (Menegaki, 2013;Kounetas, 2015;Makridou et al, 2016).…”

“…The second input is the energy consumption, which is gross inland consumption (in thousands of Toe, Eurostat) (this input is used in (Menegaki, 2013;Kounetas, 2015;Makridou et al, 2016). The real GFCF, the third input, consists of resident producers' acquisitions, minus disposals, fixed assets during a given period plus certain additions to the value of non-produced assets made by the productive activity of the producer or institutional units (in millions of euros, Eurostat)…”

“…(this input has also been used by Menegaki, 2013;Woo et al, 2015;Kounetas, 2015;Makridou et al, 2016). The outputs employed have been one desirable, the real GDP (expressed in millions of euros, the same output is used by Woo et al, 2015;Kounetas, 2015) and one undesirable, this is the GHG emissions (these emissions are an aggregate of 6 greenhouse gases: CO2, N2O, CH4, HFC, PFC, SF6, in thousands of equivalent tonnes of CO2), as in Menegaki (2013) and Makridou et al (2016)).…”

“…Within these studies, since Färe et al's (1989) there have been many works of this nature which divide the outputs into two categories -the desirable and the undesirable -among which are those of Dyckhoff and Allen (2001), Ramanathan (2002), Lansink and Bezlepkin (2003), Korhonen and Luptacik (2004), Liang et al, (2004), Triantis and Otis (2004), Zaim (2004), Picazo-Tadeo et al, (2005), Kumar (2006) and Pasurka (2006). There have also been numerous works in recent years which have followed this plan - Fare and Groskopf (2010), Liu et al, (2010), Zhou et al, (2010), Sahoo et al, (2011), Wang et al, (2014, Kounetas (2015), Sueyoshi and Goto (2015), and Zhang et al, (2015).…”

“…There are other papers which used countries in their analyses, such as Hoang and Alauddin, 2012;Krautzberger and Wetzel, 2012;Bampatsou et al, 2013;Menegaki, 2013;Chang, 2014;Woo et al, 2015). Finally, Kounetas (2015) has done a similar study but he separates the North-South clusters and he only analyzes two years (2002 and 2008). This exposition will allow every country to have the chance of analyzing its situation from a double comparative reference, the first with countries of the same geographical environment and which have an equal permanence in the EU and the second with the countries with a different time of permanence in the European Union and a different geographical location.…”