beyond gdp the quest for a measure of social welfare this paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to gdp special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analysis of sustainability in the study of happiness in the theory of social choice and fair allocation and in the capability approach it is suggested in the conclusion that although convergence toward a consensual approach is not impossible for the moment not one but three alternatives to gdp are worth developing jel i31 e23 e01

dynamic programming model estimates of social security disability insurance application timing this paper develops a dynamic programming model of the social security disability insurance ssdi application timing decision we estimate the time to application from the point at which a health condition first begins to affect the kind or amount of work that a currently employed person can do we use health and retirement study hrs and restricted access social security earnings data for estimation our results show that the type of work limiting health condition presence of employer accommodation and the relative value of income in the application state to income in the work state significantly affect the timing of ssdi application copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

the origins and development of the northeast asian political economy industrial sectors product cycles and political consequences theories of the product cycle hegemony and the world system are used to analyze the creation and development of the northeast asian political economy in this century japan south korea and taiwan have each developed in a particular relationship with the others the three taken together form a hierarchical constantly interacting political economic unit during the period of colonial rule japan was unique in building an imperial economic unit marked by a strong role for the state whether in tokyo or taipei by a tight integral unking of all three nations into a communications and transport network running toward the metropole and by a strategy of both using the colonies for agricultural surpluses and then locating industries there after 1945 a diffuse american hegemony replaced japan s unilateral system but elements of the prewar model have survived strong states direct economic development in south korea and taiwan here termed bureaucratic authoritarian industrializing regimes both countries are receptacles for japan s declining industries and both countries develop in tandem if in competition with each other the most recent export led competition has seen taiwan succeed where south korea has temporarily failed leaving seoul in an export led trap burdened with rapidly increasing external debt taiwan furthermore has industrialized relatively free of social disruption whereas korean society resisted its transformation at japanese hands and remains more rebellious today there can be one japan and one taiwan but not two or many of either in the world economy

the state and strategies of international adjustment all states are continuously in the process of adjusting to change in the political economy of international and national systems problems inherent in this adjustment process are a basic source of national behavior and international conflict the heuristic model presented in this paper provides systematic explanations for the strategic choices that states make in the adjustment process through the specification of the range of strategic options and of the formal interests of states new insights are gained concerning the articulation between national and international political economy empirical cases are drawn from the politics of energy adjustment in the 1970s

a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance data envelopment analysis dea has gained great popularity in environmental performance measurement because it can provide a synthetic standardized environmental performance index when pollutants are suitably incorporated into the traditional dea framework past studies about the application of dea to environmental performance measurement often follow the concept of radial efficiency measures in this paper we present a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance which consists of a non radial dea based model for multilateral environmental performance comparisons and a non radial malmquist environmental performance index for modeling the change of environmental performance over time a case study of oecd countries using the proposed non radial dea approach is also presented it is found that the environmental performance of oecd countries as a whole has been improved from 1995 to 1997

in search of a natural systems sustainability index abstract this research note proposes an index of sustainability to be attached to any natural system evaluated according to several indicators of sustainability the proposed index is is very operational and most of the indices proposed in the literature can be considered to be particular cases of is moreover the is propounded can be used to reach balances or compromises between an engineering solution of maximum aggregate sustainability and an ecological solution of most balanced sustainability of the system

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

the mouse that roared taiwan s management of trade relations with the united states this analysis seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the subject of the weak in the world of the strong it examines taiwan s attempts to cope with u s commerical pressure in view of its mounting bilateral trade surplus in the recent years 10 6 billion in 1985 and 6 2 billion in the first half of 1986 taiwan s past ability to achieve relatively favorable outcomes in its commerical dealings with the united states is explained at two levels at the more micro level of bargaining tactics used by the weak in managing the strong attention is directed to taiwan s resort to 1 problem redefinition 2 damage limitation 3 exploring loopholes 4 linkage politics and 5 transnational coalitions these measures are complemented by more long term and basic economic adaptation termed positive adjustment at the more macro level two prerequisites suggested by yoffie 1983 for successful adaptation in a protectionist and competitive economic environment are discussed 1 taiwan s policy

the price of wealth business and state in labor remittance and oil economies this article contrasts the effects of state controlled oil revenues and privately controlled labor remittances on institutional development state capacity and businessgovernment relations in saudi arabia and the yemen arab republic these two countries represent extreme cases of dependence on external capital in deeply divided societies presided over by fragile emerging bureaucracies by tracing the two cases through a pattern of economic boom 1973 83 and recession 1983 87 the study demonstrates that the type volume and control of capital inflows decisively influence the relative development of the bureaucracy s extractive distributive and regulatory capacities and affect the ability of the state to respond to economic crisis in both cases external capital inflows precipitated the decline of extractive institutions however oil revenues and labor remittances had divergent effects on businessgovernment relations and this circumscribed the state s ability to implement austerity programs during the recession during the crisis the saudi government s efforts to cut subsidies to the private sector and to implement extractive policies were blocked by the state sponsored merchant class in contrast the yemeni government instituted a thoroughgoing austerity package that targeted the independent merchant class in both cases external capital inflows did not augment the efficacy of those that controlled them these paradoxical outcomes are explained by tracing the different effects of oil revenues and labor remittances on the distribution of economic opportunity in the public and private sectors and the resulting effects on the regional tribal and sectarian composition of the bureaucracy and the commercial class

u s policy toward foreign direct investment foreign investment policy is an increasingly important part of overall foreign policy the authors investigate the substance of u s outgoing foreign direct investment ofdi and incoming foreign direct investment ifdi policy in terms of a small set of policy values and process factors the policy values are domestic prosperity national autonomy and national security the process factors are ideological consonance impact transparency the diffusion and concentration of perceived costs and benefits and the political capacity of groups and institutions these considerations illuminate the relative stability in both areas of policy since world war ii and help to explain the changes that did take place the paper concludes with a forecast that despite the oft heard prediction that economic nationalism is on the increase u s policies toward foreign investment will remain much the same during the eighties as they have been since world war ii

multilateral productivity comparisons with undesirable outputs in a recent paper in this journal caves christensen and diewert i982 hereafter ccd derive what they term multilateral superlative indexes for use in the comparison of output input and productivity across economic entities the indexes derived are distinguished both by transitivity and by a high degree of characteristicity a term introduced by dreschler i 973 to refer to the degree to which the weights used in a comparison are specific to the observations being compared though the indexes are presented with the application to multicountry comparisons of output input and productivity foremost in mind the authors note that they may be useful in a number of other contexts as well i e firms and industries time series and pooled time series and cross section all of the applications mentioned or implied however have this in common they involve the comparison of productive entities all of whose outputs are sold for positive prices this is not surprising of course since most products with which economists are concerned possess this characteristic however it does render incomplete or potentially misleading the comparison of productive entities which produce significant amounts of undesirable outputs such as water and air pollution since the list of such entities is rather long and includes industries critical to many national and regional economies e g chemicals paper petroleum refining copper and steel the omission of this factor from consideration may be a matter of some importance 2 consider for example a comparison of the productivity of the steel industries

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

global overview for energy use of the world economy household consumption based accounting based on the world input output database wiod abstract globalization has integrated nations into a world economy based on the world input output database wiod this paper explored the energy use of the world economy under a household consumption based mrio multi region input output accounting scheme pertaining to normative economics the household consumption based mrio accounting scheme corresponds to the value judgement of household consumption being the ultimate driver of the economy which complements existing accounting methods based on different viewpoints the energy use associated with the internationally traded products is calculated to be around one fifth of the global total energy consumption for china as the largest exporter and also the biggest deficit economy in terms of energy use its trade imbalance is nearly the summation of that of the united states the united kingdom japan and germany energy self sufficiency rates by supply and by demand are respectively proposed while the united states economy as the largest importer maintains the majority of the energy welfare denoted by the onsite energy use at home china exports large quantities of energy use abroad for economies like germany south korea and taiwan they could be regarded as hubs that export a considerable amount of energy use abroad and absorb massive energy use from outside simultaneously for sustainable use of energy resources economies are suggested to carefully identify their roles in the global trading network of energy use

agency and the design of welfare systems abstract transfers to the needy are administered by social workers whose job it is to tag welfare applicants to determine eligibility for disability benefits the accuracy of tagging depends on the effort of the social workers which is private information to prevent shirking and induce optimal effort costly monitoring is required using the framework of optimal non linear taxation we characterize the form of the optimal tax transfer system when the government operates a costly welfare system financed by income taxation higher income persons self select into the income tax system the needy apply for welfare if tagged they receive a disability benefit if untagged they receive general welfare benefits we characterize circumstances under which welfare recipients should or should not be induced to work the structure of the optimal tax transfer system and the optimal payment and monitoring of social workers

carbon emission performance evaluation and allocation in chinese cities abstract this paper presents a dea approach with multiple abatement factors to evaluate co2 emission performance and allocate co2 emission quotas in chinese cities we first consider the difference of marginal abatement costs among cities and construct the non radial directional distance function with multiple abatement factors the total factor co2 emission performance index and its dynamic change index are then proposed to measure co2 emission performance considering equity and efficiency we develop a composite index by the hybrid method to allocate emissions quota which considers co2 emissions as well as co2 emission performance then we conduct an empirical study using inputs and outputs dataset of 71 chinese cities in 2005 2012 chinese cities have poor energy efficiency and still have high co2 emissions the eastern region outperforms the central region and the western region performs worst whereas the dynamic co2 emission performance of the central region has the largest increase the change of co2 emission performance is driven mainly by technological advances as for the co2 emission allocation the composite index method encourages cities to reduce emissions and enhance emission performance through carbon trading market it also motivates cities with high historical emissions to reduce their emissions by improving technology when they have poor co2 emission performance

older people s participation in extra cost disability benefits the targeting of an uk extra cost disability benefit for older people attendance allowance is analyzed using longitudinal data from the british household panel survey first a binary model of benefit participation is used to investigate whether receipt is responsive to the onset of disability second matching estimators are used to evaluate the consequences of missed participation on later financial wellbeing results indicate that participation is highly responsive to the onset of disability although the chance of delays in receipt emerges personal characteristics unrelated to eligibility also appear to influence benefit receipt translating into sizeable differences in the amount of cash support received the comparison of recipients with observationally equivalent non recipients confirms that timely participation reduces disabled older people s financial strain

the technology gap and efficiency measure in wec countries application of the hybrid meta frontier model this study develops the hybrid meta frontier dea model for which inputs are distinguished into radial inputs that change proportionally and non radial inputs that change non proportionally in order to measure the technical efficiency and technology gap ratios tgr of four different regions asia africa america and europe this paper selects 87 countries that are members of the world energy council from 2005 to 2007 the input variables are industry and population while the output variances are gross domestic product gdp and the amount of fossil fuel co2 emissions the result shows that countries efficiency ranking among their own region presents more implied volatility in view of the technology gap ratio europe is the most efficient of any region but during the same period asia has a lower efficiency than other regions finally regions with higher industry or gdp might not have higher efficiency from 2005 to 2007 and higher co2 emissions or population also might not mean lower efficiency for other regions in addition brazil is not oecd member but it is higher efficiency than other oecd members in emerging countries case oecd countries are better efficiency than non oecd countries and europe is higher than asia to control co2 emissions if non oecd countries or asia countries could reach the best efficiency score they should try to control co2 emissions

carbon dioxide emissions allocation a review carbon dioxide co2 emissions allocation plays a fundamental role in determining reduction responsibility at economy level or emission permits at firm level past decades have seen the development and applications of various methods for co2 emissions allocation this paper provides a literature review of co2 emissions allocation with emphasis on the evolution of allocation methods used it begins with a summary of the most popular allocation principles and criteria that lay a foundation for the development of allocation methods we then classify the existing allocation methods into four groups namely indicator optimization game theoretic and hybrid approaches the main features and findings of past studies are identified and summarized while the fairness principle prevails in earlier studies the efficiency principle has been found to receive increasing attention recently we also present a comparison of the empirical results based on ten popular indicator methods to show how indicator choice affects the allocation results issues related to selecting appropriate methods in co2 emissions allocation are finally discussed further research may be carried out to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency so that the allocation results become more widely acceptable and economically feasible

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

measuring national energy performance via energy trilemma index a stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis abstract the world energy council annually releases the energy trilemma index to measure the country level energy performance however the preferences among the trilemma can change from country to country which always is an undetermined issue and full of controversy this paper comprehensively considers all possible preferences and formulates interval evaluation results under certain preference such formulations are motivated by the observations that it is difficult to reach a consensus about the weights associated with the trilemma since different weight elicitation methods inevitably produce different weighting schemes therefore we propose an interval decision making problem and apply a stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis to present a holistic measurements of the country specific energy performance this differs from the conventional wisdom that assigns exact values to corresponding weights but explores the weight space to make each country the most preferred one our analysis is demonstrated by measuring the energy performance of top 10 countries based on 2015 energy trilemma index

managing domestic differences in international negotiations the strategic use of internal side payments when nations negotiate often the toughest bargaining is not between nations but within them the reason is simple proposed international agreements no matter how much in the national interest inevitably have differential effects on factional concerns threatening to make winners of some and losers of others potential losers often have the power to prevent agreements not to their liking thereby limiting what is possible in international negotiations this article uses a negotiation analytic framework to analyze the consequences of such limits it argues that limits need not be a liability for a divided country under some circumstances they may provide a bargaining advantage and demonstrates circumstances under which intracountry differences are desirable and undesirable from a national perspective more specifically the article shows that the effect of domestic differences on international negotiations depends on the configuration of domestic interests on the nature of domestic political processes and on characteristics of the international bargain it then explores a particular dimension of the domestic process the ability to link issues which allow factions to make internal side payments it demonstrates that internal issue linkage can have profound effects on the external bargain and explores the strategic implications of side payments for those who would manage domestic differences in international negotiations

efficiency evaluation and dynamic evolution of china s regional green economy a method based on the super pebm model and dea window analysis abstract given the current circumstances of increasingly serious resource consumption and environmental pollution the development of china s green economy will profoundly impact the nation s future economic prosperity and even global economic development based on panel data from 2008 to 2017 this paper measures the green economic efficiency gee of chinese regions and analyzes its dynamic evolution using time series based on a novel data envelopment analysis dea model using environmental dea techniques this paper introduces the super pebm ebm based on pearson correlation coefficient model which is developed from the epsilon based measure ebm model and combines super pebm with the window analysis method firstly environmental dea technology is used to analyze gee at the regional level in china secondly based on panel data the window analysis method is used to analyze the regional differences of china s regional gee finally the development trend of china s regional gee in different time windows is obtained by combining the super pebm model and window analysis the empirical analysis results using panel data for regions in china from 2008 to 2017 show that 1 the overall gee of china is slowly increasing and the regional differences are still significant and 2 the improvement of gee can help to reduce regional differences

why have uk disability benefit rolls grown so much abstract over the last 30 years many countries including the uk have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving sickness and disability benefits hereafter disability benefits this is despite health levels that are generally thought to be slowly improving this paper describes the time path of uk disability benefit rolls and explores the existing uk literature together with literature from the usa in search of potential explanations for it since the early 1990s despite a number of detailed descriptive studies surprisingly little attention has been paid to quantifying the importance of the different factors believed to be driving the uk benefit roll growth this is all the more surprising given the continued growth and the level of policy attention recently and currently devoted to disability benefits in the uk

panel estimates of the determinants of british regional male incapacity benefits rolls 1998 2006 this article explores the determinants of the proportion of the working age male population claiming incapacity benefits ib across the 11 british government office regions for the period 1998 to 2006 three different approaches are adopted to modelling register dynamics first treating ib stocks as if they were trend stationary albeit with persistence and estimating reduced form models for their logs second treating ib stocks as if they were nonstationary and examining their long run determinants plus short run equilibrium reversion properties third focusing on the determinants of gross inflows and outflows that together drive ib stocks given the nature of the data no approach is ideal yet the models provide reasonably robust evidence that labour market changes specifically falling unemployment rates and rising real earnings have contributed to falling male ib stocks over the period

explaining applications to the u s disability system a semiparametric approach this study investigates the determinants of applications for u s disability benefits between 1986 and 1993 using a semiparametric discrete factor procedure separately for men and women approximating a dynamic optimization model the estimation accounts for a variety of potential biases that were unaddressed in prior studies our results indicate different responses of men and women to variations in policy measures past labor earnings and fringe benefits as well as benefit eligibility and benefit amounts clearly affect application behavior

dependency theory and taiwan analysis of a deviant case the case of taiwan represents a challenge to two predictions from dependency theory that foreign economic penetration leads to slow economic growth and also to heightened inequality since the early 1950s taiwan has received massive foreign aid and investment but it has also had one of the highest sustained rates of growth in the world while income inequality on the island has decreased substantially an examinatin of this deviant case is pursued by consideration of the various mechanisms dependency theorists claim are responsible for the linkage of foreign economic penetration to stagnation and inequality in the taiwan case none of these mechanisms work out as predicated instead a variety of factors including the nature of the japanese colonial experience the emphasis on labor intensive enterprise and the absence of an entrenched burgeoisie created a situation in which both rapid growth and increasing equality could occur consideration of taiwan draws attention to flaws in the arguments of most

measuring the performance of thermal power firms in china via fuzzy enhanced russell measure model with undesirable outputs abstract thermal power has accounted for the major part of the electricity generation over recent several decades in china it plays an important role in supporting china s economic development while it also brings great pressure to the environment protection because of a large amount of pollution generated during its production in order to solve or alleviate the environmental problem caused by thermal power firms efficiency evaluation is the first important step as thermal power firm is a complex system with multiple inputs and multiple outputs usually including fuzzy data and undesirable outputs in the productions in this paper we build an integrated enhanced russell measure model based on data envelopment analysis for evaluating the performance of decision making units in the presence of the undesirable outputs in fuzzy circumstance then this new model is applied to analyze the environmental performance and provide the benchmarks for the thermal power firms in china which can guide the decision makers to make suitable future production plans for improving their performance

measuring the immeasurable a survey of sustainability indices sustainability indices for countries provide a one dimensional metric to valuate country specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development economic environmental and social conditions at the policy level they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which a country s development can be measured and even a cross country comparison can be performed this paper reviews the explanatory power of various sustainability indices applied in policy practice we show that these indices fail to fulfill fundamental scientific requirements making them rather useless if not misleading with respect to policy advice

can higher prices stimulate product use evidence from a field experiment in zambia the controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests in part on whether higher prices can increase use either by targeting distribution to high use households a screening effect or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk cost effect we develop a methodology for separating these two effects we implement the methodology in a field experiment in zambia using door to door marketing of a home water purification solution we find evidence of economically important screening effects by contrast we find no consistent evidence of sunk cost effects jel c93 d12 i11 m31 o12

defense burden and economic growth unraveling the taiwanese enigma indicate that all these models capture parts of the empirical reality but none can account for all the complexity of this reality indeed in some crucial respects each of the models based as they have been primarily on intercountry comparisons is contradicted by the taiwanese time series i conclude that taiwan has not so much been able to avoid entirely the trade offs between defense and growth as to relax these trade offs the reasons contributing to this relaxation tend to set the taiwanese experience apart from the experiences of most other countries

the rise and fall of disability insurance enrollment in the netherlands as recently as 15 years ago the high level of disability insurance di enrollment was considered to be one of the major social and economic problems of the netherlands indeed the netherlands was characterized as the country with the most out of control disability program of oecd countries but since about 2002 the netherlands has seen a spectacular decline in its disability insurance enrollment rate radical reforms to the dutch di system were implemented over the period 1996 to 2006 we cluster these reforms in three broad categories 1 reducing the incentives of employers to move workers to disability 2 increased gatekeeping and 3 tightening disability eligibility criteria while enhancing worker incentives the reforms appear to have been very effective since 2002 yearly di inflow rates dropped from 1 5 percent in 2001 to about 0 5 percent of the insured population in 2012 we argue that particularly the interaction of employer incentives and formal employer obligations has contributed to the substantial decrease in di inflow on the downside however it seems workers with bad health have sorted into temporary employment without employers bearing the financial responsibility of their benefit costs

japan s post fukushima challenge implications from the german experience on renewable energy policy the japanese electricity sector is facing serious challenges in the aftermath of the fukushima nuclear disaster the government has responded to the crisis with a new feed in tariff to promote increased utilization of renewable energy and proposed to reduce the dependence on nuclear power in this viewpoint we liken the transition implied by recently updated goals for the diffusion of renewables in japan to the transition in germany in the last decade we argue that some of the lessons learned in germany might prove valuable for the steps japan considers taking in particular we focus on the new japanese feed in tariff for solar photovoltaics in view of the recent developments in germany we emphasize the importance of the scheme s political legitimacy which needs to be maintained through adequate design of both policy instrument and political process we conclude with policy implications and a targeted research agenda

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

ranking dmus by using interval dea cross efficiency matrix with acceptability analysis abstract cross efficiency method is an extension of data envelopment analysis dea and has been widely used for ranking performance of decision making units dmus to eliminate the non uniqueness of cross efficiency scores the aggressive and benevolent strategies have been proposed as secondary goals to determine the unique cross efficiency score the current paper aims to propose an alternative strategy which does not consider the preference of the decision maker in choosing aggressive or benevolent strategy instead the paper considers all possible weight sets in weight space when computing the cross efficiency and each dmu is given an interval cross efficiency by using the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis smaa 2 method all dmus in the interval cross efficiency matrix cem could be fully ranked according to the acceptability indices a numerical example about efficiency evaluation to seven academic departments in a university is illustrated

power industry restructuring and eco efficiency changes a new slacks based model in malmquist luenberger index measurement measuring variations in efficiency and its extension eco efficiency during a restructuring period in different industries has always been a point of interest for regulators and policy makers this paper assesses the impacts of restructuring of procurement in the iranian power industry on the performance of power plants we introduce a new slacks based model for malmquist luenberger ml index measurement and apply it to the power plants to calculate the efficiency eco efficiency and technological changes over the 8 year period 2003 2010 of restructuring in the power industry the results reveal that although the restructuring had different effects on the individual power plants the overall growth in the eco efficiency of the sector was mainly due to advances in pure technology we also assess the correlation between efficiency and eco efficiency of the power plants which indicates a close relationship between these two steps thus lending support to the incorporation of environmental factors in efficiency analysis

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

the demand for international regimes international regimes can be understood as results of rational behavior by the actors principally states that create them regimes are demanded in part because they facilitate the making of agreements by providing information and reducing transactions costs in world politics increased interdependence among issues greater issue density will lead to increased demand for regimes insofar as regimes succeed in providing high quality information through such processes as the construction of generally accepted norms or the development of transgovernmental relations they create demand for their own continuance even if the structural conditions such as hegemony under which they were first supplied change analysis of the demand for international regimes thus helps us to understand lags between structural change and regime change as well as to assess the significance of transgovernmental policy networks several assertions of structural theory seem problematic in light of this analysis hegemony may not be a necessary condition for stable international regimes past patterns of institutionalized cooperation may be able to compensate to some extent for increasing fragmentation of power

the techno bureaucratic elite and the entrepreneurial state in dependent industrialization a common characteristic of dependent industrializing countries is a substantial direct entrepreneurial role for the state one explanation for this is that in dependent industrializing countries the system of allocation and production has been captured by a key group the techno bureaucratic elite the argument is that this elite lends its political support to the state in return for the state substituting as entrepreneur in the industrialization process in this article we analyze the theoretical implications of this explanation of the entrepreneurial state a formal model is constructed of the relationship between state entrepreneurship material consequences for the techno bureaucratic elite and important domestic and international constraints we then use deductive methods to analyze the logic of state entrepreneurship among other things we show how cyclical fluctuations in the global economy are reflected in constantly changing levels of state entrepreneurship and we investigate the consequences of alternative kinds of dependency syndromes for histories of entrepreneurial substitution and for streams of benefits to the techno bureaucratic elite it is demonstrated that there is an inverse relationship between the tendencies to reach stable levels of state entrepreneurship and the long term potential for economic growth

cutting across doctrines positive adjustment in japan japan s economy keeps changing too fast its economic policies are too active and independent and its domestic structures seemingly deviate too much from western patterns to conform to theories that rely on general equilibrium in mature economies static economics including recent monetarist supply side and rational expectations models some aspects of dynamic and development economics and most of the neoliberal current in international relations theory are seriously challenged on the other hand the mercantilist paradigm theories focusing on the role of the state and analyses exclusively adopting the subsystemic level of international relations theory have substantial problems with the ample evidence of adaptation to external factors the dynamism and schumpeterian qualities of japanese private enterprises and the far reaching liberalization of japan s foreign exchange and foreign trade control regime as the only oecd member to have pursued anticipatory adjustment on the macrolevel and as the obvious model for the oecd category of positive adjustment japan presents a case of universal relevance it suggests propositions linking targets and instruments of quantitative and qualitative policies as well as processes of internalization of global factors and externalization of domestic factors it provides material for revising extending and integrating international relations theory and the theory of economic policy

indian bank efficiency and productivity changes with undesirable outputs a disaggregated approach the objective of this study is to examine technical efficiency and productivity growth in the indian banking sector over the period from 2004 to 2011 we apply an innovative methodological approach introduced by chen et al 2011 and barros et al 2012 who use a weighted russell directional distance model to measure technical inefficiency we further modify and extend that model to measure tfp change with npls we find that the inefficiency levels are significantly different among the three ownership structure of banks in india foreign banks have strong market position in india and they pull the production frontier in a more efficient direction spbs and domestic private banks show considerably higher inefficiency we conclude that the restructuring policy applied in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the indian government has not had a long lasting effect

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

targeting transfers through restrictions on recipients our objective is to design transfer programs that maximize some social welfare function following the optimal income tax formulation we assume that a random process endows individuals with characteristics that influence welfare such as ability to earn income medical condition or unmonitorable income the goal is to maximize the utility of a randomly chosen individual other individualistic social welfare functions would lead to equivalent results if the random characteristics were observable a first best outcome could be achieved by making them the basis for lump sum transfers in practice however we can observe only indicators of these characteristics such as earnings medical expenditures or consumption patterns the challenge for policy is to design an efficient second best transfer program based on indicators in this paper we argue that 1 an optimal transfer program in general must sacrifice productive efficiency to target efficiency this is done by imposing restrictions on the choices made by intended beneficiaries 2 a program that incorporates restrictions such as means tested in kind transfers commodity specific taxes and subsidies and even ordeals i e the imposition of deadweight costs to qualify for a transfer will perform better than programs that rely solely on income taxes and cash transfers

informal market governance in japan s basic materials industries too much emphasis has been placed on formal state policies and on ties between individual firms to explain japanese economic behavior and impediments to imports in japanese markets we need to look instead at informal governance by trade associations in so doing the concept of relational contracting should be applied not just to dyadic relationships between individual firms but also to relationships between entire industries whole industries engage in relational contracting to ensure the stability of both prices and supplies these industry agreements stabilize japanese markets but at the same time keep imports out of them this informal governance complements state policies to support uncompetitive industries these agreements are more likely to occur and succeed between selling and buying industries that each are relatively concentrated when upstream products are standardized when upstream goods constitute a smaller share of downstream production costs when these sectors have not experienced previous conflicts that undermine cooperation and when the ministry of international trade and industry wants a domestic supply of its products

environmental policy design innovation and efficiency gains in electricity generation this paper explores the relationship between environmental regulation innovation and competitiveness drawing upon a unique dataset on environmental regulations directed at combustion plants a global dataset of power plants and a global dataset of environmental patents the analysis is conducted in two stages first a nonparametric frontier analysis is implemented to estimate efficiency scores including a measure of technological innovation based on patent stocks second econometric methods are applied to analyse the role of policy stringency and policy design on efficiency our estimation sample covers thermal power plant sectors in 20 countries from 1990 to 2009 the results show that the stringency of environmental regulations is a significant determinant of productive efficiency with respect to pollutant emissions as well as fuel use however these effects turn negative once the level of stringency leaps over a certain threshold in addition the paper concludes that the positive effect of regulatory stringency can be diminished by a negative effect of regulatory differentiation with measures which are differentiated across plant size and age having negative consequences and these effects are increasing over time this finding is important given the prevalence of size and vintage differentiated policies in many countries finally it is found that integrated approaches to environmental innovation are more likely to bring about efficiency improvements than end of pipe technologies

a structural model of social security s disability determination process we estimate a multistage sequential logit model reflecting the structure of the disability determination process of the social security administration ssa the model is estimated using household survey information exact matched to ssa records on disability adjudications from 1989 to 1993 under program provisions different criteria dictate outcomes at different steps of the determination process we find that without the multistaged structural approach effects of many important health disability and vocational factors are not readily discernible as a result split sample predictions of overall allowance rates from the sequential model perform considerably better than do those for the conventional allowed denied logit regression

disability insurance benefits and labor supply some additional evidence this article examines the effects of a change in the canada quebec pension plan c qpp disability benefits on the labor supply of older canadian workers i obtain my estimates by exploiting a large increase in benefits that only occurred in the qpp program which only operates in quebec while benefits in the cpp program which operates in the rest of canada were unaffected unlike the existing estimates from the united states as well as earlier canadian obtained by gruber i find that disability benefits are not associated with a large increase in the nonparticipation of older men

disability insurance rejection rates and the labor supply of older workers abstract we investigate the effects of trying to mitigate moral hazard in the disability insurance di program by raising the stringency of the screening process for applicants we do so by studying a dramatic increase in rejection rates for the di program in the late 1970s which varied substantially across the us states we find that each 10 rise in denial rates led to a statistically significant 2 8 fall in labor force non participation among 45 64 year old males we also find that the denial rate increases effectively targeted their incentive effects to more able individuals according to an anthropometric measure of disability

estimating the linkage between energy efficiency and productivity abstract many analyses have referred to industrial productivity benefits associated with energy efficiency that are at least as great or larger than the energy benefits if plants with higher energy intensity also tend to have lower productivity then energy policy needs to consider this this study examines this issue for two segments of the glass industry using plant level data from the census bureau productivity is defined by the difference in best practice production efficiency as measured by data envelopment analysis dea this study uses regression analysis to estimate how differences in plant level electricity and fossil fuel intensity i e energy use per unit of production are attributable to differences in plant level productivity and other economic variables like energy prices and cumulative production in every case productivity differences between plants are statistically significant in explaining differences in plant energy intensity the coefficient that links productivity to energy efficiency yields a less than proportional impact for only one industry and fuel type for others the relationship is implies that a 1 increase in productivity increase energy efficiency by more than 1 this effect is statistically significant for flat glass but not container glass the estimates of the price and learning by doing coefficients seem reasonable but without imposing the assumption that all plants in the industry are equally productive this lends further credence to a significant relationship between productivity and energy efficiency

a non radial malmquist productivity index with an illustrative application to chinese major industries abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of peer units when multiple outputs and inputs are present dea based malmquist productivity index measures the technical and productivity changes over time the current study extends the malmquist productivity index into a non radial index where the decision maker s preference over performance improvement can be incorporated the non radial malmquist productivity index eliminates possible inefficiency represented by the non zero slacks the method is applied to measure the productivity change of three chinese major industries textiles chemicals and metallurgicals during four five year plan periods the paper shows how dea based malmquist productivity index can be employed to evaluate the technology and productivity changes resulted from the economic development plans the paper also shows the importance of using the non radial malmquist productivity index

self screening in targeted public transfer programs the self screening properties of initial eligibility determination a mechanism often under the control of the administrators of targeted transfer programs are derived and the use of this mechanism in the social security disability insurance system is explored empirically an increase in the rigor of initial eligibility screening may discourage potential applicants because they are unaware of appeal prospects and because the eligibility decision delay is lengthened as denied applicants are forced to appeal their claims in the disability program a 10 percent increase in the initial denial rate induces a 4 percent decrease in applications self selection is nonperverse

a new frontier approach to model the eco efficiency in european countries abstract this study aims to evaluate the resource and environment efficiency problem of european countries we specify a new stochastic frontier model where gross domestic product gdp is considered as the desirable output and greenhouse gases ghg emissions as the undesirable output capital labor fossil fuels and renewable energy consumption are regarded as inputs gdp ghg ratio is maximized given the values of the other four variables the study is divided into two distinct periods 2000 2004 and 2005 2011 this division is related to the implementation of the kyoto protocol in 2005 and will allow us to evaluate the difference between the levels of efficiency before and after the establishment of environmental targets since stochastic frontier models are typically ill posed a new maximum entropy approach to assess technical efficiency which combines information from the data envelopment analysis and the structure of composed error from the stochastic frontier approach without requiring distributional assumptions is presented in this work

the newly industrializing countries in the international system explanations of the growth of the newly industrializing countries nics by neoclassical economists and dependency theorists neglect the role of politics in shaping development strategies different social configurations state structures and ideas about development help explain the divergent policy choices made by the export oriented east asian nics korea and taiwan and the more inward looking countries of latin america particularly mexico and brazil these different strategic choices in turn account for variations in the patterns of external dependency that characterize countries in the two regions

protectionism and world politics much unwarranted gloom and doom has been written of late about the new protectionism it has been widely held to be a major hindrance to third world development an obstacle in the path of world economic recovery and even a threat to good international relations the facts about trade in recent years suggest a different story and the need to look far more critically at some of the myths propounded by liberal economists for it was not protectionism that was responsible for starting the depression of the 1980s any more than that of the 1930s then as now it was financial uncertainty and the consequent shrinkage of credit that slowed both growth and trade nor is protectionism a serious menace not only has it failed to stop the flood of industrial exports from asian countries there afe good reasons of state and corporate self interest why it need not be feared in the future far from being a threat to the international economic order as imf and gatt ideologues would have us believe bilateral trading agreements between states and corporations are sustaining continued growth in trade despite financial disorder

a non simplistic approach to composite indicators and rankings an illustration by comparing the sustainability of the eu countries composite indicators are very popular despite being affected by several problems that often result in lack of robustness of the rankings involved the aim of this paper is to show that composite indicators can be safely used provided that rankings are built via uncertainty analysis rather than using a single composite for this purpose the approach we follow first combines different normalisation aggregation rules and weighting systems to calculate many different composites and then derives the rankings from the frequency distribution of the rankings of each competitor according to each composite such an approach appears to be a good compromise between the need for a more concise overview when looking at many variables and the loss of relevant information occurring when indicators are aggregated into a single composite indicator to illustrate the approach we rank eu countries in terms of their sustainability

measuring development with inequality how should aggregate indicators of development account for inequality abstract the paper analyzes how inequality is accounted for in aggregate indicators of development and whether and how it should be used the motivation behind the study stems from the renewed interest in inequality in academia public discourse and in global policy first we argue that inequality should be considered when constructing development indicators the role of distribution in development is important both because people generally prefer lower inequality and inequality tends to have negative effects on development outcomes second we analyze how ten selected development indicators account for inequality in terms of justification type of inequality measure of inequality and method of incorporation and what the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches are we found considerable diversity especially for inequality measures and methods of incorporation as for the type of inequality inequality of opportunities is considered marginally and overlapping inequalities not at all increasing data availability opens the door for inclusion especially for the latter aspect as most indicators suffer from insufficient methodological substantiation we argue for increased clarity regarding why and how inequality is accounted for in development indicators the analysis is complemented by a detailed review of treatment of inequality by the analyzed indicators annex

how middle powers can manage resource weakness japan and energy the post world war ii world has seen the transformation of the international system from a configuration with several rival great powers into one with two superpowers and a set of lesser but still substantial powerssecond tier states with democratic politics and mixed economies one of the recurrent concerns of the latter has been to secure supplies of natural resources we argue that postwar conditions point to eight elements of prudent resource policy for middle level powers such states should i avoid military means 2 choose trade partners whose political interests overlap with their own and who enjoy political stability 3 seek to create in supplier and transit countries a structure of economic interests that will make supply agreements self enforcing 4 diversify with respect to commodity dependence supplier share and transit bottlenecks 5 tailor stockpiles to the urgency of demand 6 exploit technology to reduce dependence and enhance bargaining advantages 7 encourage the private sector and public enterprises to become intermediaries in the international resource trade and 8 pursue strategic interdependence among consumer nations by creating multilateral stakes in the maintenance of normal commerce in resources in this paper we develop a set of general prescriptions for the behavior of mid level powers with small endowments of natural resources we hold that states which follow these prescriptions will avoid endangering their economic performance indeed they may outperform others that apparently hold an advantage in terms of greater resource endowments and military power we use the case of japanese energy policy to develop our prescriptions and to demonstrate their feasibility the case has special interest because of the importance of energy resources in the world economy japan s extreme dependence on and thus policy efforts related to imported energy and the vigor of the japanese economy

allocation of co2 emission permits economic incentives for emission reductions in developing countries the economic impacts on developing regions following a global cap and trade system for carbon dioxide are assessed through the use of an energy economy systems model both an equal per capita allocation and a contraction and convergence allocation with convergence of the per capita emissions by 2050 are shown to offer economic incentive for africa india and probably also latin america to accept binding emissions commitments under a 450 ppm carbon dioxide stabilization scenario the gain for latin america is mainly a result of increased export revenues from sales of bio fuels as a result of the climate policy it is on the other hand unlikely that these allocation approaches would offer an economic incentive for china to join the regime because of its high economic growth present higher per capita emissions than india and africa and more costly mitigation options than latin america a more stringent allocation for developing countries such as contraction with convergence of the per capita emissions by the end of this century is estimated to generate reduced net gains or increased net losses for the developing regions though africa is still expected to gain

cost minimizing welfare programs abstract we study opportunities for lowering the cost of welfare programs by exploiting heterogeneity in the unobservable tastes of welfare recipients relying on the inability of cash based programs to achieve self selection we provide circumstances in which it is optimal to provide payments in kind our model differs from other self selection models because we allow the recipients the opportunity to trade the subsequent to the receipt of their welfare packages the presence of unreported cash among the recipient population is considered

intrinsic variability in group and individual decision making the paper examines the random preference model which can explain inherent variability of preferences in managerial and individual decision making and provides axiomatizations for the utility components of two such models differentiated by the structure of core preferences expected utility eu and betweenness like preferences we then examine the possibility of violations of weak stochastic transitivity for these models and for a model with core dual eu preferences such violations correspond to the existence of condorcet cycles and therefore the analysis has implications for managerial decision making and for majority rule voting the paper also investigates implications of its findings for two popular experimental settings this paper was accepted by james smith decision analysis

a dea approach for estimating the agricultural energy and environmental efficiency of eu countries this study attempts to evaluate the energy and environmental efficiency of the primary sectors of the eu member state countries the evaluation is based on a non radial data envelopment analysis dea model which allows for non proportional adjustments to energy inputs and undesirable outputs and thus it provides different estimations for energy and environmental efficiency scores the 2001 2008 time period was selected for this research one of the most important findings is that countries like germany sweden or austria with strong environmental protection standards appear to be less energy and environmentally efficient compared with countries like denmark belgium spain france or ireland in addition a series of eastern european countries achieve low efficiency scores which can be characterized as expectable due to low technology level being implemented in the primary production process there are also two sub periods for this research the first one 2001 2006 covers the fully coupled with specific cultivations period for subsidy administation and the second 2007 2008 where the new decoupled subsidy scheme was implemented there are significant hints for considerable changes of energy and environmental efficiency after the implementation of the the new cap with the new member states siginificantly differ of both energy and environmental efficiency copmared with the older ones

efficiency performance and regulation of the international gas industry a bootstrap dea approach abstract natural gas has become increasingly important as a source of energy in recent years it is widely viewed as an attractive means of realizing environmental objectives post kyoto and individual country gas industries have been extensively restructured to encourage investment from the private sector barriers to international trade in gas have fallen particularly in areas such as europe and asia as pipeline facilities have expanded and trading systems have become established an important question for policy makers concerns the use of scarce resources by this expanding industry regulatory authorities increasingly use efficiency comparators to incentivise minimum cost use of resources by price cap methods yardstick competition and other techniques this paper explores some of the policy developments which affect efficiency of resource use in the gas industry and uses data envelopment analysis to measure relative performance at the individual country level recent developments in bootstrapping techniques are used to correct efficiency estimates for bias and to assess the uncertainty surrounding such estimates the implications of these results for regulatory authorities are then explored

imperfect tagging in social insurance programs abstract this paper derives the optimal benefit structure of an earnings insurance program when a characteristic or tag imperfectly identifies those unable to work with a two sided classification error the optimal program is a dual work incentive system with a work non work consumption differential maintained for the tagged and untagged just sufficient to induce the able in each group to work and with more generous payments to tagged than to untagged individuals of the same work status it includes premiums to program eligible individuals who work a price missing in the u s social security disability system and in earlier attempts to characterize the optimal disability program

screening disability insurance applications this paper investigates the effects of stricter screening of disability insurance applications a large scale experiment was setup where in two of the 26 dutch regions case workers of the disability insurance administration were instructed to screen applications more stringently the empirical results show that stricter screening reduces long term sickness absenteeism and disability insurance applications we find evidence for direct effects of stricter screening on work resumption during the period of sickness absence and for self screening by potential disability insurance applicants stricter screening seems to improve targeting efficiency without inducing negative spillover effects to the inflow into unemployment insurance the costs of stricter screening are only a small fraction of the monetary benefits

the impact of stricter criteria for disability insurance on labor force participation this paper studies the effect of a large scale policy change in the austrian disability insurance program which tightened eligibility criteria for men above a certain age using administrative data on the universe of austrian private sector employees the results of difference in difference regressions suggest a substantial and statistically significant decline in disability enrollment of 6 to 7 4 percentage points and an increase in employment of 1 6 to 3 4 percentage points the policy change had important spillover effects into the unemployment and sickness insurance program specifically the share of individuals receiving unemployment benefits increased by 3 5 to 3 9 percentage points and the share receiving sickness insurance benefits by roughly 0 7 percentage points

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance we develop two slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance on the basis of environmental dea technology of the two measures one is a composite index with a higher discriminating power for modeling economic environmental performance and the other can be used to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations we apply the proposed measures to model the co2 emissions of 30 oecd countries from 1998 to 2002 and present the results obtained

eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis abstract in public discussion on environmental policy the notion of eco efficiency is often used the joint production of goods and undesirable outputs such as pollutants which may not be freely disposable without costs causes difficulties to measure the overall performance of the firm because of the absence of market prices for the undesirable outputs we are not able to estimate the environmental costs some of the measurement and evaluation difficulties can be overcome by employing data envelopment analysis dea as the efficiency measurement vehicle we propose the use of two different approaches in the first approach we start by decomposing the problem into two parts 1 the problem of measuring technical efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the inputs and 2 the problem of measuring so called ecological efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the undesirable outputs separately those two efficiency indicators are then combined in the second approach we treat pollutants as the inputs in the sense that we wish to increase desirable outputs and decrease pollutants and inputs the approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the efficiency of 24 power plants in a european country

non parametric frontier approach to modelling the relationships among population gdp energy consumption and co2 emissions abstract in this paper a non parametric approach based in data envelopment analysis dea is proposed as an alternative to the kaya identity a k a impact this frontier method identifies and extends existing best practices population and gdp are considered as input and output respectively both primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas ghg emissions are considered as undesirable outputs several linear programming models are formulated with different aims namely a determine efficiency levels b estimate maximum gdp compatible with given levels of population energy intensity and carbonization intensity and c estimate the minimum level of ghg emissions compatible with given levels of population gdp energy intensity or carbonization index the united states of america case is used as illustration of the proposed approach

from competition to collaboration the challenge of commercial class aircraft manufacturing sectoral analyses reveal an emerging tension between a global market and an anarchic political system and oblige scholars to examine the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between states and markets this analysis of commercial class aircraft manufacturing a strategic industry demonstrates how corporate behavior affects political choices and vice versa it suggests that corporate and political policymaking is a messy process first policymakers must respond to multiple and often conflicting demands from both domestic and international constituencies second they are influenced by a number of variables including ideology interest group activity consequences of previous policies perceptions about their state s position in the international system and available knowledge about how to realize specific goals sets of competing variables which act as centripetal and centrifugal forces are identified and analyzed in terms of how they have impelled corporations to seek transnational production arrangements three prototypical structures of international production are delineated and the potential consequences for states and corporations participating in each model are discussed the key objectives of the article are to encourage the use of multivariate analyses to explain change in the international system and to provoke further debate about the appropriate policies to pursue to achieve global economic competitiveness across a number of industry sectors