environmental efficiency evaluation of industry in china based on a new fixed sum undesirable output data envelopment analysis national natural science funds of china for innovative research groups 70821001 national natural science funds of china 70901069 71222106 71203186 research fund for the doctoral program of higher education of china 20133402110028 fundamental research funds for the central universities wk 2040150007 china scholarship council

is social capital green cultural features and environmental performance in the european union this paper analyses the relationship between social capital and environmental performance in the european union in a first stage environmental performance is measured by an index of eco efficiency at the country level computed using data envelopment analysis techniques and data for the year 2013 in a second stage the influence of social capital and other relevant control variables on eco efficiency is assessed by means of truncated regressions and bootstrapping as proposed by simar and wilson j econom 136 1 31 64 2007 for several model specifications tests fail to reject the hypothesis of no effect of social capital on environmental performance and the main driver of environmental performance is found to be the level of economic development measured by gdp per capita furthermore this result is robust to different definitions of social capital and sample periods

the price of pollution a dual approach to valuing so2 allowances under the 1990 clean air act amendments a market based scheme to reduce u s sulfur dioxide emissions takes effect in 1995 indications are that participation in the market will be light and allowance prices will be lower than was once expected using an output distance function approach for wisconsin coal burning utility plants we estimate the shadow price of so2abatement which should approximate the allowance price the estimated average shadow price is above the prices at which the few observed allowance trades have occurred wisconsin s stringent state so2legislation may explain a portion of this divergence

inverted block or lifeline rates and micro efficiency in the consumption of electricity abstract recent evidence indicates that the marginal cost of electricity exceeds average electricity rates a model is presented in this paper to investigate the conditions under which inverted block or lifeline rates could contribute to minimizing the deadweight loss associated with electricity consumption although conditions exist where inverted block rates might aggravate deadweight loss empirical evidence is presented suggesting that inverted block rates would in fact improve the efficiency of electricity consumption

energy efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry accounting for undesirable outputs abstract this paper used data from 50 enterprises in china s iron and steel industry to evaluate their energy efficiency and productivity change the study first used a conventional data envelopment analysis model and the malmquist productivity index mpi to measure the energy efficiency and productivity change over the period 2001 2008 the results indicated inefficiency in many of the plants the average energy efficiency was only 61 1 the annual growth rate of productivity was 7 96 over this period and technical change was the main contributor to this growth the research then took undesirable outputs into consideration by using the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi to explore the productivity change from 2006 to 2008 omitting undesirable outputs would result in biased efficiency change and technical change this paper also claimed that environmental regulation has a potentially positive impact on technical change

environmental efficiency and abatement efficiency measurements of china s thermal power industry a data envelopment analysis based materials balance approach abstract appropriate measurement of environmental and emission abatement efficiency is crucial for assisting policy making in line with constructing a more sustainable society the majority of traditional approaches for environmental efficiency measures take pollutant emissions as either undesirable outputs or environmentally determined inputs which suffer a limitation of not satisfying the physical laws that regulate the operation of economic and environmental process in this study we propose a dea based approach which is combined with the materials balance principle mbp that accounts for laws of thermodynamics to jointly evaluate environmental and abatement efficiency this approach is along the line of weak g disposability based modelling but is an extension to existing models that in our approach the identification of possible adjustments on polluting mass bound in inputs and outputs and potential adjustments on abatement of pollutants are all included the overall environmental efficiency measured by this approach is decomposed into the measures of technical efficiency polluting inputs allocative efficiency and polluting and non polluting inputs allocative efficiency with the emphasizing of incorporating pollutant abatement activities accordingly new measures of abatement efficiency are proposed which help to identify the pollutant abatement potential that can be achieved from end of pipe abatement technology promotion associated with polluting input quality promotion and input resources reallocation furthermore several global malmquist productivity indices for identifying the changes on environmental and abatement efficiency are proposed this approach is applied to china s thermal power industry and some empirical results verifying the necessity of introducing the mbp are obtained

assessing regional environmental efficiency in china with distinguishing weak and strong disposability of undesirable outputs abstract china has developed a remarkable economic growth in the past 30 years by accompanying with undesirable outputs the assumptions of weak and strong of undesirable outputs have become the focus discussion in data envelopment analysis dea models to have a comprehensive environmental efficiency measurement this paper proposes three dea models considering weak disposability strong disposability and distinguishing weak and strong disposability of undesirable outputs respectively we further combine with the malmquist luenberger productivity index to assess the environmental efficiency and the dynamic change trend of 30 provinces in china from 2005 to 2014 the results show that distinguishing technical features of undesirable outputs makes a significant difference to final environmental efficiency score at different regions the environmental efficiency of the whole nation however does not show any increasing trend during the ten years enhancing environmental efficiency of central and west area is an urgent task for chinese government the change trend of malmquist luenberger productivity index and technological change shows a similar shape technical progress is the main driving force to enhance the environmental efficiency relevant suggestions are presented for improving the regional environmental efficiency in china in the future

mixed strategy nash equilibrium in data envelopment analysis abstract in a typical productivity analysis the efficiency measure assumes a perfectly competitive market with an endogenous price and depends on a fixed orientation with respect to a specific firm such as an input oriented measure when an imperfectly competitive market affects the endogenous price however firms may take a mixed strategy approach to address uncertain competition this study proposes a mixed strategy measure msm we construct a model embedded with a data envelopment analysis dea framework that identifies the mixed strategy nash equilibrium in the first stage and considers a probabilistic and multi oriented efficiency measure in the second stage based on the environmental regulation and a typical nash measure we create two indices environmental consistency and strategic consistency to support the business roadmap development we validate the proposed msm with an empirical study of china s electric power industry the results find that the proposed msm complements the nash measure and the msm model successfully supports our two managerial strategies invest in capacity expansion or develop emission abatement technology

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

impact of emission regulation policies on chinese power firms reusable environmental investments and sustainable operations abstract this study investigates the impact of emission regulation policies i e emergency response policy versus long term protection policy on the investment levels of reusable environmental facilities e g desulphurization pumps used by coal fired power plants in china to improve their sustainable operations to set up a baseline for further analysis and compare the impact of emission regulation policies an improved framework for performance evaluation of sustainable operations is developed in this study by integrating classical data envelopment analysis dea and exponential learning curve the proposed mathematical models are applied into an empirical study of 27 major million kw coal fired power plants in mainland china empirical analysis shows that the interactions among official emission regulation policies reusable environmental investment rei and sustainable operations management of coal fired power plants in china several policy suggestions are provided for power firm managers and policy makers in china specifically we suggest that the chinese government should implement long term protection policies in less developed regions instead of emergency response policies

how much climate policy has cost for oecd countries abstract high economic cost of climate policy has attracted critical debate since the kyoto protocol however reliable empirical evidence of the abatement cost of green house gases across countries remains scant in this study we estimate the average yearly green house gas abatement costs per capita for a panel of 28 oecd countries in years 1990 2015 the marginal abatement costs are estimated using a novel data driven approach based on convex quantile regression compared to traditional frontier estimation methods the quantile approach takes into account a broader set of abatement options and is more robust to inefficiency noise and heteroscedasticity in empirical data the comparison of oecd countries shows that the actual abatement cost per capita has been very modest much lower than predicted in the late 1990s this result has profound policy implications calling for more ambitious climate change mitigation strategy in the future

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

shadow pricing of undesirable outputs in nonparametric analysis abstract for three decades a growing interest in the modeling of desirable and undesirable outputs has led to a theoretical and methodological debate in the nonparametric literature on production technology and efficiency the first main discussion is about the way of modeling bad undesirables as inputs or outputs or by transformation functions the second debate concerns the implications of the weak disposability assumption in the modeling of bad outputs in particular the possibility of assigning unexpected signs to shadow prices of bad outputs in addition we point out a current error in the modeling of weak disposability under a variable returns to scale technology in this paper we introduce a hybrid model to ensure the economically meaningful jointness of good and bad outputs while constraining shadow prices of bad outputs to their expected sign we argue that it is a sound compromise to model undesirable outputs with a meaningful primal dual economic interpretation finally we propose an extension to define shadow prices for undesirable outputs following the law of one price loop rule

nonparametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs reply hailu and veeman 2001 henceforth hv use both primal nonparametric dea and dual nonparametric frontiers that include undesirable outputs the dual frontier provides the tightest nonparametric outer bound to the unknown underlying technology while the dea frontier provides the tightest innerbound to the technology varian banker and maindiratta chavas and cox all previous nonparametric analyses incorporating undesirable outputs had been based on the dea model and hv highlighted the limitations of this one sided approach by confronting the results from the dea model with those from the dual model the dea model was found to be very poor in terms of discriminating between observations as indicated in hv this is a problem that has also been noted by several other researchers in the conventional productivity literature before i provide specific responses to some of the comments by fare and grosskopf fg i would like to make the following general remarks first hv use input based measures and a variable returns to scale formulation of the dea model however fg support their arguments using output possibility frontiers output based measures and constant returnsto scaleassumptionsthatwerenotusedinhv it is well known that a dea model with constant returns to scale has different characteristics and provides different results compared to those with variable returns second and more importantly it should be noted that the dea model with constant returns to scale does not qualify as the inner nonparametric bound that is the subject of hv s article third the major difference between the weakly disposable and hv dea frontiers becomes irrelevant for measures of efficiency that explicitly penalize extrabadoutput infg sfigure1 forexample the area east of line bc is irrelevant in the hv

the eco efficiency of pulp and paper industry in china an assessment based on slacks based measure and malmquist luenberger index abstract china has become the world largest paper and paperboard producer however pulp and paper industry has involved high resource consumption and severe pollution especially for water this research has assessed the eco efficiency of china s pulp and paper industry at the national level and provincial level an overview regarding the cleaner production of china s pulp and paper industry was presented to reveal the measures for reducing environmental impact in the last two decades slacks based measure was used to analyze the efficiency levels of 16 provinces pulp and paper industries to uncover the underlying causes of eco efficiency performance malmquist luenberger index was calculated to discover the drivers of productivity growth of pulp and paper industries our results showed that the pollution treatment of china s pulp and paper industry has made progress in terms of water consumption and water pollution although the absolute amount of pollution discharge is still large chemical oxygen demand emissions are still the first critical influencing factor of pulp and paper industry s inefficiency furthermore efficiency progress was the dominating contribution of the industry s productivity growth between 2010 and 2013 the policies for adjusting the industrial structure of pulp and paper industry have resulted in the scale effects through eliminating backward production capacity and accelerating merger and acquisitions moreover the productivity of pulp and paper industry was underestimated when the undesirable outputs were ignored it indicates that the stricter environmental regulations have positive effects on paper companies to internalize environmental pressures in the production activities through environmental management in the future pulp and paper companies should further internalize the cost of pollution treatment through scale effects and technology improvement

environmental efficiency analysis of power industry in china based on an entropy sbm model chinese national natural science fund 71073040 710201139 71273075 humanities and social science fund of the ministry of education 09yjc790061

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

the approach to realizing the potential of emissions reduction in china an implication from data envelopment analysis abstract by proposing a three hierarchy meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper first decomposes co 2 emissions efficiency and the potential for emissions reduction into the following three components structural technical and management based on these components we then conduct an empirical analysis of china s total factor co 2 emissions efficiency its potential for co 2 emissions reduction and its corresponding implementation path the results show that co 2 emissions efficiency in mainland china is relatively low because of structural inefficiency technical inefficiency and management inefficiency the chinese government is expected to realize a large quantity of co 2 emissions reduction potential nearly 40 of the current total co 2 emissions through adjusting the industrial structure narrowing the technology gap among regions promoting the reform of marketization and strengthening environmental regulation the causes of co 2 emissions inefficiency and the distribution of potential reductions in emissions show a distinct spatial difference characteristic therefore this paper also formulates emissions reduction strategies for china s 30 provinces according to their specific situations noting the direction of the industrial structure adjustment and the path to improving co 2 emissions efficiency

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

the if how and where of assessing sustainable resource use in today s economies those who sustain the burden of resource use those using resources and those providing resources are not necessarily identical with this separation come three fundamental but interrelated decision making perspectives on the sustainability assessment of resource use these three perspectives correspond to the three assessment questions if how and where resources should be used most sustainability assessment approaches do not make their underlying assessment perspectives explicit the goal of this paper is to provide structure and organisation to existing approaches this structuring suggests that any discussion on the appropriateness and validity of different assessment approaches and their results must take into account the underlying assessment perspective the three questions if how and where resources should be used correspond to the requirements of a sustainable resource use while existing assessments do address the three questions in isolation it is all the more important that the limitations and implications of focusing on a single perspective are spelled out as the main contribution the paper distinguishes the rationale of each assessment perspective and develops on their interlinkages and thus provides the context and structure for a more informed and fruitful debate on the assessment of sustainable resource use

regional environmental efficiency in china an empirical analysis based on entropy weight method and non parametric models abstract while vigorously developing its economy china is attaching more and more importance to environmental protection and pollution control in different regions of china however there are great differences in economic development and the degree of environmental pollution in this study we use the entropy weight method to calculate the pollution indexes of different regions from 2015 to 2017 then we evaluate the chinese regional environmental efficiency based on a new non parametric frontier model moreover a new set of ranking interval models that treat the undesirable outputs as inputs is proposed to further describe the regional disparities of the environmental efficiency between different regions with robustness finally we conduct an empirical analysis by combining the stepwise regression and principal component analysis to identify the most influential variables that may affect regional environmental efficiency according to the results the southeast region of china performs best in environmental efficiency followed by the northeast region then the southwest region and the worst is the northwest region for managerial implications we find that the investment of high education and the development of the it industry can significantly increase regional environmental efficiency more importantly the results of the principal component analysis provide the government with a set of variables to strategically select the most appropriate strategy

alternative measures of environmental technology structure in dea an application abstract the nonparametric data envelopment analysis dea literature on environmental efficiency ee considers handling undesirable outputs in two alternative ways either in their original forms with the assumption that these are weakly disposable or in various translated forms with the assumption that these are strongly disposable choosing a particular approach implies adoption of a particular distinct treatment of undesirable outputs and hence yields a distinct set of ee estimates to explore the effects of the interplay between choice of ee measure and specific treatment of undesirable outputs this paper attempts to generate all possible output oriented ee measures based on these two alternative approaches furthermore guided by the argument that slacks are important in identifying properly the efficiency behavior of firms it proposes two new alternative slacks based formulations of ee one based on the range directional model and the other on the generalized proportional distance function model using a confected data set of ten firms and a real life data set of 22 oecd countries our empirical analysis reveals that first ee scores are influenced not only by the choice of disposability assumption for undesirable outputs but also by the way these are treated in various translated forms second the choice of any particular treatment of undesirable outputs plays no role in influencing the rankings of firms and third our two new alternative ee formulations are at the least viable alternatives to existing ee measures in ranking firms according to their eco efficiency behavior

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

an analysis of chinese provincial carbon dioxide emission efficiencies based on energy consumption structure abstract china plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 40 45 by 2020 and by 60 65 by 2030 this research project addresses this challenge by analyzing chinese provincial carbon dioxide emission efficiencies and the energy consumption structure the study applies the slacks based measure sbm model to analyze the data from 30 regions in china from 2000 to 2011 the situation of provincial carbon dioxide emission efficiency the characteristics of the energy consumption structure in each province and the differences among these provinces are quantitatively analyzed based on the k means cluster analysis this research suggests that china be divided into five groups in the energy consumption structure the inefficient and less reasonable group the inefficient and more reasonable group the efficient and less reasonable group the efficient and more reasonable group and the efficient and most reasonable group the study offers recommendations for the government to develop policies to effectively and efficiently reduce carbon dioxide emission levels for each group it also has profound implications for government administration in developing countries to guide the energy consumption and to control environmental pollution for the healthy development of the economy

congestion measurement under different policy objectives an analysis of chinese industry abstract in recent years the economic performance of chinese industry has improved significantly however the congestion caused by excessive investment has plagued its sustainable development in order to make full use of resources it is necessary for the chinese government to measure industrial congestion from different perspectives however most studies for measuring congestion only consider desirable outputs even if in practice these are always accompanied by undesirable outputs in this paper three policy objectives are proposed for industrial development in china the economic priority the environmental priority and the economic and environmental win win three new data envelopment analysis dea models with undesirable outputs were built for measuring undesirable congestion desirable congestion and double congestion respectively for these policy objectives these approaches can not only identify congestion situation but also calculate the total amount of congestion and were applied to an analysis of the congestion of regional industries in china results show that most regions have some form of longstanding input congestion under different policy objectives with this resulting in serious waste of resources based on the results obtained some suggestions for sustainable industrial development in china are proposed

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

technical efficiency and impact of environmental regulations in farrow to finish swine production in taiwan this article demonstrates how technical efficiency and the impact of environmental regulations of taiwanese farrow to finish swine production can be estimated in the presence of undesirable outputs the issue of measuring technical efficiencies while considering undesirable outputs has been addressed by past studies but the proper method of including undesirable outputs has always been a subject of debate this article develops a data envelopment analysis dea based model that includes undesirable outputs the technologies of desirable output production and undesirable output control are considered simultaneously this allows one to transform undesirable output into desirable output whereby a traditional shephard distance function can be used to measure technical efficiencies an approach to measuring the impacts due to environmental regulations is then derived empirical results show that larger farms are more technically efficient than small sized farms but no clear conclusions can be reached for the measures of regulatory impact among farms with different sizes on average the sample farms incurred an opportunity cost due to environmental regulations equivalent to 9 8 of market value opportunity costs rise with efficiency

the effect of newspaper entry and exit on electoral politics we use new data on entries and exits of us daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation party vote shares and electoral competitiveness our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends we find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0 3 percentage points newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller the effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years we find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate sized effects we find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents

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

marginal co2 abatement costs findings from alternative shadow price estimates for shanghai industrial sectors abstract shanghai one of the most developed cities in china is implementing a pilot regional carbon emission trading scheme estimating the marginal abatement costs of co2 emissions for the industrial sectors covered in shanghai s emission trading scheme provides the government and participating firms useful information for devising compliance policies this paper employs multiple distance function approaches to estimating the shadow prices of co2 emissions for shanghai industrial sectors our empirical results show that the overall weighted average of shadow price estimates by different approaches ranges between 394 5 and 1906 1 yuan ton which indicates that model choice truly has a significant effect on the shadow price estimation we have also identified a negative relationship between the shadow price of co2 emissions and carbon intensity and the heavy industries with higher carbon intensities tend to have lower shadow prices it has been suggested that shanghai municipal government take various measures to improve its carbon market e g using the marginal abatement costs of participating sectors firms as a criterion in the initial allocation of carbon emission allowances

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

dynamic pollution adjusted inefficiency under the by production of bad outputs abstract this article extends the by production model to the dynamic context of adjustment costs associated with investment the empirical application focuses on panel data of french suckler cow farms over the period 1978 2014 considering emissions of greenhouse gases as bad output the paper estimates input and output specific technical inefficiency scores in the dynamic context and compares them with efficiency measures from the conventional static context our results reveal significant differences between inefficiency scores derived from the static and the dynamic frameworks for all variables except meat production the good output the inefficiency score is lower in the dynamic context than in the static context

airline dynamic efficiency measures with a dynamic ram with unified natural managerial disposability abstract in this paper we propose a dynamic range adjusted measure with unified natural managerial disposability to evaluate the dynamic efficiency of 29 airlines during 2009 2015 in a dynamic period the new model can judge automatically whether the airline should be under natural disposability or managerial disposability in the premise of optimizing the overall efficiency we get some findings 1 scandinavian has the highest overall efficiency among these 29 airlines while norwegian s overall efficiency is the least 2 improving undesirable outputs is not the most urgent work of these airlines 3 in order to optimize the overall efficiency most airlines should be under managerial disposability 4 most airlines efficiencies have no obvious fluctuation in this period

radial and non radial decompositions of luenberger productivity indicator with an illustrative application abstract viewing slacks as one possible source of inefficiency and that inputs have differential importance in the production process this paper develops based on the directional russell measure of inefficiency the non radial luenberger indicator this indicator is then shown as the sum of the individual input specific luenberger indicators the luenberger indicator and its various input specific indicators are also then shown as the composite measure of efficiency change and technical change this decomposition enables the researcher to empirically examine the contributions of each factor input towards the productivity change and its components efficiency change and technical change our proposed decomposition scheme is then empirically illustrated to analyze the eco productivity performance behavior of the 22 oecd countries during the period 1995 2004 our results indicate that first the productivity change estimates yielded from the non radial luenberger indicator are different from those yielded from its radial counterpart when slacks are present second most of these countries are found experiencing productivity growth due to technical progress alone and finally as regards the order of input specific contributions towards productivity growth capital contributes the most followed by savings in emissions and labor respectively

congestion measurement for regional industries in china a data envelopment analysis approach with undesirable outputs abstract the industry in china has been developing extensively in the last few decades large investments in china s industry may cause congestion because congestion is a widely observed economic phenomenon in such a scenario in order to know the performance and allocate resources well it is necessary for the chinese government to measure congestion of the industry many scholars have studied this topic by means of data envelopment analysis dea however previous studies only pay attention to the framework of desirable outputs in fact undesirable outputs often accompany desirable outputs in production thus in this study a new approach for measuring congestion with undesirable outputs is proposed and applied to analyzing congestion of the industry in 31 administrative regions of china the results show that five regions have congestion in their industry in 2010 besides the regions located in the east of the country perform the best in ecological efficiency followed by regions in central and west china based on these findings this paper proposes some political schemes to improve regional industrial efficiency

efficiency effect of changing investment structure on china s power industry abstract based on data of china s power industry from 2005 to 2010 this research applies the sbm approach of the dynamic dea model one of the efficiency measurement methods that corresponds with economy energy environment trinity to analyze the energy efficiency dynamic total factor productivity ecdtfp 1 of the power industry and the efficiency effect of changing investment structure on the industry the results indicate that the introduction of foreign capital and the reform to lower the share of state investment are conducive to raise the ecdtfp in the power sector in addition it is important to focus on vital factors such as the production structure the industry concentration and the regional technology investment intensity which significantly affect the productivity of the power sector in future policies and reforms

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

nonparametric analysis of technical and allocative efficiencies in production in this paper we extend varian s 1984 nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output input and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm in such cases varian s results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data we identify each firm whose performance given the prices faced by it may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output input vectors we show that the set 4 of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a closed convex and monotone production possibility set that contains all the observations and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8o is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices by definition firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations we follow farrell 1957 and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures considering as admissible all closed convex and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization we then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical allocative and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets it is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis thus establishing a link between this literature in management science operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics

the allocation of phd enrolment quotas in china s research oriented universities based on equity and efficiency principles abstractphd enrolment quota allocation proves the key concern for china s universities to promote institutional reform and improve research level and it is often characterized by the zero sum game

measurement of agricultural total factor productivity growth incorporating environmental factors a nutrients balance approach this article proposes to use nutrient orientated environmental efficiency ee measures to construct a nutrient total factor productivity index ntfp since nutrient orientated ee measures are consistent with the materials balance principle ntfp index is superior to other existing tfp indexes an empirical study on the environmental performance of an agricultural sector in 30 oecd countries from 1990 to 2003 yielded several important findings first these countries should be able to produce current outputs with at least 50 less aggregate eutrophying power implying that they should have been able to substantially reduce the potential for eutrophication second traditional tfp has grown by 1 6 per annum due to technical progress however there are lags in the responses of several countries to this technical progress third environmental tfp has grown at a slower rate than traditional tfp growth due to reductions in nutrient orientated allocative efficiency finally changes in input combinations could have significantly improved environmental efficiency and productivity these findings favor policy interventions and faster technological transfer to improve environmental performance

allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits with the minimum cost for chinese provinces in big data environment abstract the environmental problem and global warming have drawn many governments attention in order to solve the problem reasonable allocation of carbon dioxide emission cde permits is an important issue because it sets the targets for the decision making units to control the amount of carbon dioxide emission in this paper a new data envelopment analysis approach is proposed to evaluate the efficiency of decision making units in a big data environment and set the carbon dioxide emission permits for each decision making unit with the minimum costs comparing with the previous works on carbon dioxide emission permits allocation we firstly allocate the amount of carbon dioxide emission permits taking account into the cost each decision making unit should take to achieve its target moreover two kinds of linear programming problems are developed under efficiency invariance principle and efficiency changeability principle respectively as the allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits causes the minimum cost the decision making units are more easily to accept the allocation alternative finally our approach is applied to the carbon dioxide emission permits allocation among chinese provinces the results show that the approach can well allocate the cde permits with the minimum cost and also reveal the relationship between the marginal cost of reducing cde permits and the adjustment on them

examining the drivers of total factor productivity change with an illustrative example of 14 eu countries abstract based on the different models developed by korhonen and luptacik korhonen p luptacik m 2004 eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis european journal of operational research 154 437 46 this contribution centers on the development of an intertemporal comparison in order to analyze eco efficiency change over time in this setup two model variants by korhonen and luptacik 2004 are used in order to provide deeper insights concerning the driving forces for the change in the eco efficiency which bias in technical change can be observed is it more input saving or pollution reducing for illustration purposes the proposed approach is used to analyze the performance of 14 countries of the european union for the period 1995 2004 an average eco productivity growth of 22 is observed the estimated contribution of improved use of input is 20 and that of reduced relation of greenhouse gas emissions is 23 therefore it is concluded that on average the eco productivity growth is more driven by improved environmental conditions

will airline efficiency be affected by carbon neutral growth from 2020 strategy evidences from 29 international airlines abstract in this paper the impact of the carbon neutral growth from 2020 cng2020 strategy on airline efficiency is analyzed based on the predicted data of 29 international airlines during 2021 2023 the data is predicted through neural network following the principle of cng2020 strategy we calculate the emission limit for each airline two models network range adjusted measure with natural disposability and network range adjusted measure with managerial disposability are proposed to discuss the efficiency change when the cng2020 strategy is considered the following findings are gotten 1 under natural disposability the indices related with undesirable output have a larger role in deciding benchmarking airline 2 for most of the 29 airlines cng2020 strategy has little influence on their efficiency

the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy a malmquist index analysis of oecd countries abstract in recent years renewable energy and environmental efficiency have been interesting issues for both academics and industry actors when discussing sustainable development against this background the present study examines the environmental efficiency of renewable energy from the static and the dynamic perspective in 31 oecd countries a study conducted to understand the impact of renewable energy across countries as a non parametric methodology data envelopment analysis is used to measure environmental efficiency through multiple inputs and outputs labor capital and renewable energy supply are the three inputs while gdp is the desirable output and carbon emissions are the undesirable output to measure the dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy the malmquist productivity index is applied to estimate the average efficiency change from 2004 to 2011 the results demonstrate geographical differences in environmental efficiency across the oecd countries in oecd america have the highest average environmental efficiency and those in oecd europe have the largest standard deviation we also find that dynamic efficiency is influenced by the global financial crisis triggered in the united states further we show that oecd countries implement both catch up and frontier shift strategies to improve environmental efficiency

rationality of energy efficiency improvement targets under the pat scheme in india a case of thermal power plants abstract the market based perform achieve and trade scheme was introduced in india to enhance the energy efficiency of energy intensive sectors and for thermal power plants by reducing their specific energy consumption within the framework of a tradable certificate scheme international experience suggests that effectiveness of such schemes is greatly influenced by the assigned targets of the obligated units setting rational targets is thus a key aspect of successful implementation of the scheme in the present study we examine the rationality of the targets set for the power sector of india based on comparing it with energy saving potential of the plants and the targets assigned to the respective plants data envelopment analysis models are used to determine relative efficiency and energy saving potential the study results indicate that in most cases i the targets are much less than the actual potentials of the thermal power sector ii there exist substantial inefficiencies within the system in both energy use and managerial dexterity and iii if the sector realizes its full potential then the energy saving certificate market may witness a surplus of 4 7 million certificates on account of thermal power sector alone

alternative methods for environmentally adjusted productivity analysis abstract advances in the productivity with which food is produced around the world have been made possible through the intensive use of industrial inputs that have important environmental impacts like standard measures of macroeconomic performance however commonly used measures of agricultural efficiency and productivity account only for marketed commodities and inputs but ignore the environmental effects of these production processes a more complete analysis of trends in the sector s productivity requires the use of models that incorporate these environmental effects to provide better measures of the contributions of the sector from the social point of view this paper compares the conceptual merits and empirical performance of alternative approaches that can be employed for this purpose input distance functions output distance functions nonparametric methods and index number approaches each of the methods has relative strengths and weaknesses the methods are empirically illustrated using data from the canadian pulp and paper industry

incorporating the learning effect into data envelopment analysis to measure msw recycling performance abstract the effect of organizational learning which results in continuous improvement of organizational performance over time has been widely discussed the cumulative learning effect may form as a source of intellectual capital thus far the static data envelopment analysis dea model has not been used to examine the longitudinal learning effect therefore a two stage approach is developed together with the estimation of a latent learning effect using time series data the estimated learning effect is then used as an input in the dea slacks based measure sbm model the proposed dea sbm model can be used to investigate the efficiency of the organizational learning effect of municipal solid waste msw recycling systems this study estimated the cumulative learning effect of 23 local governments in taiwan from 2001 to 2009 using regression analysis the results were incorporated into the dea sbm model to evaluate the relative performance of msw recycling systems in 2009 this work makes three major contributions first this paper developed a new approach that incorporates organizational learning effects into the dea sbm model second improved policies were provided to local governments with inefficient msw recycling systems third this paper found that household disposable income levels influence learning methods leading to a considerable difference in cumulative learning effects in promoting recycling policies local governments should determine whether such policies can be disseminated and implemented given the local community s standard of living

efficiency evaluation of chinese regional industrial systems with undesirable factors using a two stage slacks based measure approach abstract the process of a regional industrial system in china can be separated into two internal stages production stage and pollutant abatement stage this paper aims to examine the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by taking the operational performance of its two internal stages into consideration unlike traditional data envelopment analysis models that treat decision making units as black box when measuring their efficiencies with undesirable factors this paper proposes a two stage model based on slacks based measure to evaluate the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by decomposing the efficiency into production efficiency and abatement efficiency the proposed model can estimate the efficiencies of the whole regional industrial system its production stage and abatement stage simultaneously the model provides a way of improving performance of a regional industrial system through identifying its inefficient internal stages this can help to find out the main sources of the inefficiency that arise from the internal stages within the system which cannot be done by using conventional environmental data envelopment analysis models findings resulting from the model application show that there are great disparities in regional industrial systems efficiencies and the inefficiency of chinese industrial system is largely driven by the abatement stage

multi output efficiency with good and bad outputs abstract cherchye de rock dierynck roodhooft and sabbe 2013 introduced a dea methodology that is specially tailored for multi output efficiency measurement the methodology accounts for jointly used inputs and incorporates information on how inputs are allocated to outputs in this paper we present extensions that render the methodology useful to deal with undesirable or bad outputs in addition to desirable or good outputs interestingly these extensions deal in a natural way with several limitations of existing dea approaches to treat undesirable outputs we also demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodological extensions through an application to us electric utilities

banks efficiency and credit risk analysis using by production approach the case of iranian banks abstractthis article uses a by production approach that integrates credit risk to monitor bank efficiency the method overcomes the possible misspecification issues of the commonly assumed weak disposability wda of undesirable outputs in addition our measure extends the classic by production approach by including statistical aspects through subsampling techniques we have also provided an algorithm to correct related infeasibilities using this approach we investigate the performance of iranian banks and credit risk management in the sector for the period 1998 2012 non performing loans npls have been used as an undesirable output and proxy for credit risk in our models based on our empirical results although the banks generally exhibited efficiency improvements over time their credit risk performance deteriorated considerably after the regulatory changes introduced in 2005 these findings confirm that credit quality can be monitored more actively across iranian banks

productivity growth and environmental regulations accounting for undesirable outputs analysis of china s thirty provincial regions using the malmquist luenberger index this paper employs the malmquist luenberger ml productivity index to evaluate china s growth in total factor productivity tfp incorporating undesirable outputs during the period from 1989 to 2008 the ml productivity index and its components technical and efficiency changes are derived from the directional distance function which gives credit for an increase in good outputs and for reductions in undesirable outputs the average annual ml productivity growth accounting for undesirable outputs is 2 46 whereas the value of the traditional malmquist productivity index is 4 84 showing that the true tfp growth in china is overestimated if undesirable outputs are ignored we explore the strictness in enforcing environmental regulations and its impact on improvements in ml productivity the results show that the enforcement of environmental regulations in china is in general far below the levels achieved in the best performing regions and that the more stringent enforcement of environmental regulations would help to improve ml productivity growth in china

measuring environmental efficiency of industry a case study of thermal power generation in india technical and environmental efficiency of some coal fired thermal power plants in india is estimated using a methodology that accounts for firm s efforts to increase the production of good output and reduce pollution with the given resources and technology the methodology used is directional output distance function estimates of firm specific shadow prices of pollutants bad outputs and elasticity of substitution between good and bad outputs are also obtained the technical and environmental inefficiency of a representative firm is estimated as 0 06 implying that the thermal power generating industry in andhra pradesh state of india could increase production of electricity by 6 while decreasing generation of pollution by 6 this result shows that there are incentives or win win opportunities for the firms to voluntarily comply with the environmental regulation it is found that there is a significant variation in marginal cost of pollution abatement or shadow prices of bad outputs across the firms and an increasing marginal cost of pollution abatement with respect to pollution reduction by the firms this result calls for the use of economic instruments like pollution taxes instead of command and control regulation used currently in india to reduce air pollution

measuring technical efficiency in the presence of pesticide spillovers and production uncertainty the case of dutch arable farms pesticides dynamic effects and production uncertainty play an important role in farmers production decisions pesticides have a current production impact through reducing crop damage in the current period and a future impact through impacting the farm biodiversity which alters the future production environment this study presents the difference in inefficiency arising from models that ignore the dynamic effects of pesticides in production decisions and the impact of production uncertainty a dynamic data envelopment analysis dea model is applied to outputs inputs and undesirables of dutch arable farms over the period 2003 2007 a bootstrap approach is used to explain farmers performance providing empirical representations of the impact of stochastic elements on production these empirical representations are used to adjust firms inefficiency scores to incorporate production uncertainty in efficiency evaluation we find that efficiency increased dramatically when a production technology representation that considers both pesticides dynamic impacts and production uncertainty is adopted

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis with undesirable outputs environmental economics and natural resources group at wageningen university in the netherlands weak disposability of outputs means that firms can abate harmful emissions by decreasing the activity level modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis has caused some confusion this article identifies a dilemma in these approaches conventional formulations implicitly and unintentionally assume all firms apply uniform abatement factors however it is usually cost effective to abate emissions in those firms where the marginal abatement costs are lowest this article presents a simple formulation of weak disposability that allows for non uniform abatement factors and preserves the linear structure of the model

a study of allocative efficiency of pm2 5 emission rights based on a zero sum gains data envelopment model abstract it is an urgent task for china to control haze emission in environmental treatment emission right trading is a feasible way to achieve the reduction of pollutant emission on the premise that the total pollutant emission amount is under control and the allocation of initial emission rights based on the target total amount is the key to emission right trading in this paper via the input oriented zsg dea model the inter provincial allocative efficiency of pm2 5 emission rights is investigated under the condition that the target total amount is fixed the results showed that 1 after initial emission rights were allocated in accordance with the zsg dea model pm2 5 emission amounts of all provinces would be in a new common dea frontier so as to realize the overall pareto optimality with a set total amount 2 two factors namely land areas and atmospheric environmental capacities of all provinces were considered in the actual allocation to avoid the homogenization of all evaluated units found in the previous evaluation literature on allocative efficiency thereby making the evaluation results more in line with the actual situations in all provinces such an investigation approach can provide guidance on the allocation of initial emission rights in emission right trading and the research results can offer empirical support for haze reducing work load conducted by central and local governments of china

environmentally sensitive productivity analysis of the canadian pulp and paper industry 1959 1994 an input distance function approach abstract this study employs a parametric input distance function that incorporates both desirable and undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology from which environmentally sensitive productivity and efficiency measures can be generated this framework also generates pollution abatement cost estimates that are useful for policy making an input based malmquist index of productivity growth that appropriately credits the producer not only for increases in marketable or desirable outputs but also for the production of improved environmental quality through pollution abatement activities is derived from the input distance function the method was applied to time series data from the canadian pulp and paper industry our shadow price estimates indicate that the marginal cost to producers of pollution control has been rising the main conclusion of this study is that productivity improvement from the social viewpoint has been stronger than conventional measures would suggest

a critical review of distance function based economic research on china s marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emissions abstract the last few years have witnessed a rapidly emerging literature estimating the marginal abatement cost or the shadow price of carbon dioxide co2 emissions in china using parametric or non parametric distance function approaches this is largely driven by the fact that china has become the world s largest carbon emitter and thus faced mounting domestic and international pressure to mitigate emissions there is an urgent policy need to model and predict the cost burdens of various mitigation scenarios consistent information about the marginal abatement cost of co2 emissions plays a crucial role in addressing this need however the existing literature has suffered from various issues that have severely weakened the scientific support that these studies could potentially provide for sound policy making this paper provides a thorough and critical review of this rapidly emerging literature and identifies important research directions that need the most attention from scholars

a comprehensive analysis of china s regional energy saving and emission reduction efficiency from production and treatment perspectives abstract energy and environmental issues have recently aroused increasing interest in china and many approaches are used to evaluate energy and environmental performance in this paper a two stage network dea framework is applied to evaluate the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction in china during the period of the eleventh five year plan from 2006 to 2010 in this study economic activities are divided into production and treatment processes this is different from previous research which generally focused on either environmental efficiency or energy efficiency omitting the integration of energy and environmental measures today energy saving and emission reduction are both parts of the basic state policy of china and are equally important the empirical results in this study show that i eastern china has the best energy saving and emission reduction efficiency performing is better than western and central china ii the efficiency of the production process in central china is better than that in western china while the western area performs better than the central area in term of treatment efficiency iii integrated efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction of china was relatively stable in the five years and the pollution treatment efficiency maintained a rising trend

environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry a data envelopment analysis dea based approach abstract china s economic has got remarkable achievements during the past 30 years which has brought tremendous pressure on natural resources and serious environmental pollution at the same time in this paper we aim to make environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry data envelopment analysis dea method is incorporated and the slacks based measure sbm model considering undesirable outputs is introduced to measure the environmental efficiency of different regions big data theory is introduced in the collection and selection of the input and output data of the regions further we evaluate the environmental efficiencies of china s industry using data from 2008 to 2012 the results show that apart from several developed provinces the environmental efficiencies of china s industry are generally low and the environmental efficiencies of the regions did not show any increasing trend through the past 5 years additionally lager differences exist in environmental efficiencies between the regions in china finally we suggest the chinese government to focus on the low environmental efficiencies and the unbalanced development of its regional industry

evaluating the method of total factor productivity growth and analysis of its influencing factors during the economic transitional period in china abstract this paper proposes a method for the evaluation of total factor productivity tfp based on the super efficiency data envelopment analysis dea model and the malmquist luenberger index under china s constraints for carbon emissions data sampled from eight cities in two large areas in anhui province in central china namely the wan jiang region and the northern anhui region from 2001 to 2009 were cited as the sample for the analysis of the low carbon tfp index an analysis of the low carbon index changes and composition during the period of economic transformation was also conducted the empirical analysis results indicate that the technical efficiency change has a lower effect on the progress of total factor productivity and that technological progress exerts the dominant force in total factor productivity growth this study also performed hausman tests of the factors influencing the total factor productivity and suggested advances in certain policies accordingly

an economic approach to environmental indices abstract this study uses the directional output distance function from economic productivity theory as an alternative approach to environmental index construction we use the directional output distance function to aggregate multiple environmental objectives into one measure of environmental performance we apply this method to a set of watershed data and compare our results to the existing u s environmental protection agency epa index values when modeling the same set of objectives the directional output distance function and the existing epa index yield similar measures of environmental performance we discuss the mathematical properties of both indices using the axioms of economic index theory and explore the possible advantages to our approach the mathematical properties of the directional output distance function are well established and this approach provides a nonparametric way to aggregate individual characteristics this advances the standard use of a priori weighted summation and circumvents the often contentious selection of index weights

economic value of greenhouse gases and nitrogen surpluses society vs farmers valuation abstract livestock supply must challenge the growth of final demand in the developing countries this challenge has to take into account its ecological effects since the dairy and livestock sectors are clearly pointed out as human activities which contribute significantly to environmental deterioration therefore livestock activity models have to include desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously using this perspective we implement a data envelopment analysis model to evaluate shadow prices of outputs under contradictory objectives between the society and the farmers we show that farmers are able to reduce pollution significantly if society accepts to balance farmers opportunity cost finally we observe that initial levels of the co 2 tax implemented in european countries are in line with farmers valuation while the current level of the co 2 tax tends to reach the value of pollution targeted by the society