efficiency performance of current account bop flows in advanced world economies considering ghg emissions abstract current account ca imbalances reveal the unequal trade and foreign direct investment t fdi flows between various countries this paper investigates the performance of the ca component of the balance of payments bop of major advanced economies following the recent global financial and economic crisis 2013 2017 using a data envelopment analysis dea second stage approach slack based inefficiency sbi dea models are proposed using both a conventional perspective and a sustainability perspective that consider greenhouse gas ghg emissions as an undesirable output the efficiency assessment aims to identify output slacks i e exports and income inflows shortfalls as well as input slacks i e import and income outflows excesses in the second stage explanatory factors of the observed ca inefficiencies have been investigated using regression models under frequentist and bayesian frameworks although some differences exist between the conventional and sustainability scenarios regarding the negative effects of trade diversification and external debt and energy dependency on ca inefficiency in both scenarios the results indicate links between ca inefficiency and geographical regions socio economic development and the burden of customs procedures

returns to scale damages to scale marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution in dea environmental assessment abstract this study discusses a new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution between desirable and undesirable outputs to discuss mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of corporate strategies to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the concept of disposability is separated into natural and managerial disposability then this study explores the computational framework of rts returns to scale and dts damages to scale the type of rts is measured within the natural disposability while the type of dts is measured within the managerial disposability considering the two types of disposability this study discusses mrt and rs between desirable and undesirable outputs as an illustrative example this study applies the proposed approach to evaluate the performance of us coal fired power plants this study finds that the regulation policy on no x and so 2 has been effective on their emission controls under us clean air act caa the regulation on co 2 or a major source of the global warming and climate change is still insufficient in the united states therefore this study recommends that us federal and local governments should regulate the amount of co 2 emission under the caa

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis reply to fare and grosskopf fare and grosskopf this issue claim that a single abatement factor suffices for modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production models and that the kuosmanen 2005 technology that uses multiple abatement factors is larger than necessary this article demonstrates by a numerical example that a single abatement factor does not suffice to capture all feasible production plans and that its use leads to the violation of convexity one of the maintained assumptions of the model we also prove that the kuosmanen technology is the correct minimum extrapolation technology under the stated axioms

nonparametric production technologies with weakly disposable inputs abstract in models of production theory and efficiency analysis the inputs and outputs are assumed to satisfy some form of disposability in this paper we consider the assumption of weak input disposability it states that any activity remains feasible if its inputs are simultaneously scaled up in the same proportion as suggested in the literature the shephard technology incorporating weak input disposability could be used to evaluate the effect of input congestion we show that the shephard technology is not convex and therefore introduces bias in evaluation of congestion to address this we develop an alternative convex technology whose use in the evaluation of congestion removes the noted bias we undertake a further axiomatic investigation and obtain a range of production technologies all of which exhibit weak input disposability but are based on different progressively relaxed convexity assumptions apart from the evaluation of input congestion such technologies should also be useful in applications in which some inputs are closely related or are overlapping and therefore satisfy only the weak input disposability assumption incorporated in the new models

directional shadow price estimation of co2 so2 and nox in the united states coal power industry 1990 2010 abstract shadow prices also termed marginal abatement costs provide valuable guidelines to support environmental regulatory policies for co 2 so 2 and no x the key contributors to climate change this paper complements the existing models and describes a directional marginal productivity dmp approach to estimate directional shadow prices dsps which present substitutability among three emissions and are jointly estimated we apply the method to a case study of co 2 so 2 and no x produced by coal power plants operating between 1990 and 2010 in the united states we find that dsp shows 1 1 times the maximal shadow prices estimated in the current literature we conclude that estimating the shadow prices of each by product separately may lead to an overestimation of the marginal productivity and an underestimation of the shadow prices

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

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

the economic costs of environmental regulation in u s dairy farming a directional distance function approach analyses of the costs of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy production which could be used to assess the effectiveness of alternative policy measures is a missing link in the literature this article addresses this gap by establishing the economic impact associated with a hypothetical greenhouse gas environmental regulatory regime across major dairy producing counties in the united states in doing so the article makes three important contributions to the literature first it develops a comprehensive pollution index based on environmental protection agency methodologies which contrasts with previous studies that rely on partial measures based only on surplus nitrogen stemming from the over application of fertilizer second the article uses a directional output distance function an approach that has not been employed previously to evaluate polluting technologies in the u s dairy sector third the article incorporates a four way error approach that accounts for unobserved county heterogeneity time invariant persistent technical efficiency time varying transient technical efficiency and a random error the results indicate that regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farming would induce a 5 percentage point increase in average technical efficiency in addition the economic costs of implementing this hypothetical regulatory framework exhibit significant spatial variation across counties in the united states

returns to scale and damages to scale on u s fossil fuel power plants radial and non radial approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment paying attention to a methodological bias i e different methods produce different results dea is analytically classified into radial and non radial approaches the radial approach determines the level of unified operational and environmental efficiency by measuring an inefficiency score the score indicates the distance of a projection from an observed performance to an efficiency frontier in contrast the non radial approach determines the level of unified efficiency by measuring a total amount of slacks because each slack indicates inefficiency to avoid the methodological bias this study considers the use of radial and non radial approaches in this study we consider a production process where all organizations produce not only desirable good but also undesirable bad outputs as a result of their business operations to unify the two types of outputs this study discusses the concept of disposability which is separated into natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified efficiency by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change under the two disposability concepts this study discusses how to measure rts returns to scale under natural disposability and dts damages to scale corresponding to rts on undesirable outputs under managerial disposability the two scale measures are analytically discussed by the proposed radial and non radial approaches with scscs or without scscs where scscs indicate strong complementary slackness conditions an illustrative example on u s fossil fuel power plants indicates a policy implication that they need to introduce new technology for environmental protection this study also discusses a necessity of examining a methodological bias in energy studies empirical findings identified in this study document the practicality of the proposed approaches to measure rts dts

firms expectations and employment behaviour evidence from a panel of uk manufacturing firms abstract in this paper we investigate the effect of expectations of future sales on employment adjustment we find that uk manufacturing firms sales expectations have a statistically significant effect on their employment behaviour leading to employment being more sluggish to respond when firms expect sales to rise

marginal values and returns to scale for nonparametric production frontiers we present a unifying linear programming approach to the calculation of various directional derivatives for a very large class of production frontiers of data envelopment analysis dea special cases of this include different marginal rates the scale elasticity and a spectrum of partial and mixed elasticity measures our development applies to any polyhedral production technology including to name a few the conventional variable and constant returns to scale dea technologies their extensions with weight restrictions technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs and network dea models furthermore our development provides a general method for characterization of returns to scale rts in any polyhedral technology the new approach effectively removes the need to develop bespoke models for the rts characterization and calculation of marginal rates and elasticity measures for each particular technology

meta data envelopment analysis finding a direction towards marginal profit maximization abstract this paper discusses a new meta dea approach to solve the problem of choosing direction vectors when estimating the directional distance function the proposed model emphasizes finding the direction for productivity improvement rather than estimating the score of efficiency focusing on planning over evaluation in fact the direction towards marginal profit maximization implies a step by step improvement and wait and see decision process which is more consistent with the practical decision making process an empirical study of u s coal fired power plants operating in 2011 validates the proposed model the results show that the efficiency measure using the proposed direction is consistent with all other indices with the exception of the direction towards the profit maximized benchmark we conclude that the marginal profit maximization is a useful guide for determining direction in the directional distance function

a comment on weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis in his 2005 paper in this journal kuosmanen argues that shephard s specification of weak disposability in activity analysis dea models is not correct we show that shephard s specification does satisfy weak disposability and is the smallest technology to do so

data envelopment analysis for environmental assessment comparison between public and private ownership in petroleum industry abstract environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue in the world this study discusses how to apply data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment an important feature of the dea environmental assessment is that it needs to classify outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because private and public entities often produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the three types of unification for dea environmental assessment by using non radial dea models the first unification considers both an increase and a decrease in the input vector along with a decrease in the direction vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification measures unified efficiency the second unification considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability and measures unified efficiency under natural disposability the third unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as managerial disposability and measures unified efficiency under managerial disposability all the unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs to document their practical implications this study has applied the proposed approach to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil firms this study identifies two important findings on the petroleum industry one of the two findings is that national oil companies under public ownership outperform international oil companies under private ownership in terms of unified operational and environmental efficiency and unified efficiency under natural disposability however the performance of international oil companies exhibits an increasing trend in unified efficiency the other finding is that national oil companies need to satisfy the environmental standard of its own country while international oil companies need to satisfy the international standard that is more restricted than the national standards as a consequence international oil companies outperform national oil companies in terms of unified efficiency under managerial disposability

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

measuring and forecasting regional environmental and economic efficiency in italy abstractenvironmental and economic efficiency has being receiving growing attention among researchers in general terms this concept is related to the capability of the economic systems to employ natural resources efficiently so as to increase economic and human wealth this clearly implies that both the economic and ecological aspects of decisions ought to be considered bearing this in mind this article considers economic and ecological performance together by applying data envelopment analysis and the malmquist productivity index to investigate the efficiency of the 20 italian regions from 2004 to 2011 the results reveal that the northern regions have been more efficient than the southern ones highlighting the strong geographical differences between the two furthermore this article uses the grey system theory to forecast regional economic and environmental efficiency the results of the forecasting analysis show that the north south duality remains strong and will possibly increase since the r

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

environmental benefits from marketable discharge permits or an ecological vs economical perspective on marketable permits abstract economists typically extol the virtues of marketable discharge permits based on their ability to obtain a given environmental standard at least cost previous empirical studies of marketable permits have quantified the benefits from the use of permits relative to a command and control system in terms of cost savings occasionally the benefits of a permit system are described by noting that the efficiency of such systems would allow improved environmental quality relative to a command and control system for the same cost that is the increased efficiency resulting from a permit system would allow environmental regulators to tighten emission standards resulting in less pollution while still holding costs at their initial level this paper presents a simple conceptual model that examines the potential emission savings from a marketable permit system the conceptual model is empirically implemented with data on abatement costs for light duty vehicles in california the emission saving potential is directly compared with the cost saving potential although cost savings from a marketable permit system in this context are found to be relatively modest on the order of 1 to 10 the emission savings potential is found to be much larger estimates of the emission savings possibilities range from about 7 to 65

nerlovian revenue inefficiency in a bank production context evidence from shinkin banks the paper further advances the contemporary methodological and empirical research on bank efficiency we introduce a bank two stage network revenue decomposition analysis based on the slack based directional inefficiency measurement framework by building upon the approaches of epure and lafuente 2015 fukuyama and weber 2009 2010 fukuyama and matousek 2017 and fare fukuyama grosskopf and zelenyuk 2015 2016 we apply the model on the segment of japanese financial institutions shinkin banks we examine the efficiency performance of shinkin banks during the period from march 2007 to march 2015 this covers the recent years after the turmoil in the us subprime residential mortgage market which started early 2007 the applied innovative framework is particularly suitable for this type of banks since the financing of their business activities is mainly dependent on the different types of deposits that the proposed model takes into consideration

distinguishing operational performance in power production a new measure of effectiveness by dea measuring the efficiency of power plant systems requires capturing fluctuations in the level of sales to customers as well as accounting for the effects of regulatory caps on emissions this study proposes a novel effectiveness measure considering desirable outputs and undesirable outputs via data envelopment analysis dea the new measure complements typical efficiency measures we test the validity of the proposed measure with an empirical case study of the fifty u s states and the district of columbia we find that the current interregional electricity transmission plan increases 8 56 in effectiveness for the emissions control we suggest a 9 8 reduction in electricity generation towards an effective production frontier we conclude that the proposed effectiveness measure s ability to distinguish sales and regulation effects from typical productive efficiency eliminates the bias often found in currently used measures

dea radial measurement for environmental assessment and planning desirable procedures to evaluate fossil fuel power plants abstract energy policy depends on a proper use of methodology in guiding a large energy issue such as the global warming and climate change dea is one of such methodologies that are often used for preparing environmental policy which is closely linked to various energy issues unfortunately the use of dea applied to environmental policy is insufficient often misguiding policy makers and other individuals who are involved in energy issues this study provides three guidelines for a use of dea in preparing environmental assessment first it is important to prepare both primal and dual formulations to confirm whether information regarding all production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs is fully utilized in dea assessment second dea has model variations in radial and non radial measurements it is necessary for us to examine environmental issues by different models in order to avoid a methodological bias existing in those empirical studies finally dea environmental assessment needs to incorporate the concept of natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates that a firm negatively adapts a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates that a firm positively adapts the regulation change because the firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity

the impossibility of convex constant returns to scale production technologies with exogenously fixed factors abstract the extensions to the variable vrs and the constant crs returns to scale models developed by banker and morey are considered among the main approaches to the incorporation of exogenously fixed factors in models of data envelopment analysis dea recently syrjanen showed that the banker and morey crs technology is not convex taking into account that its subset vrs technology is explicitly assumed convex this observation leads to difficulties with explaining the fundamental production assumptions of the crs extension motivated by the example of syrjanen the contribution of this paper is twofold first we show that the nonconvex banker and morey crs technology is nevertheless a suitable reference technology for the assessment of scale efficiency second we ask if a convex technology could be constructed that would correct the nonconvexity of the crs technology of banker and morey the answer to this is negative one consequence of assuming both convexity and ray unboundness with fixed exogenous factors is that we can always mix and match discretionary and nondiscretionary factors taken from different units arriving at totally unrealistic production plans this demonstrates that generally there exists no meaningful convex crs technology with exogenously fixed factors that can be used in its own right apart from its use as a reference technology in the measurement of scale efficiency

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

a two stage dea approach for quantifying and analysing the inefficiency of conventional and organic rain fed cereals in spain abstract this paper assesses the efficiency of rain fed cereals crops grown in southern spain the proposed approach uses a two stage data envelopment analysis dea plus regression approach in the first stage a slacks based inefficiency sbi dea model is used to project conventional and organic cropping systems onto the efficient frontier the results of the efficiency analysis show that conventional production is more inefficient than organic production and that the main sources of inefficiency in the case of conventional production correspond to excessive input consumption and ghg emissions in the case of organic production the inefficiency comes from output shortfalls it is shown that reducing inefficiency would reduce the amount of ghg emitted per unit of fresh matter yielded this potential gain is more pronounced in the case of conventional production but also occurs for organic production in the second stage the crops efficiency scores are regressed against some exogenous variables using a fractional regression model the regression results confirm that organic production significantly decreases inefficiency and they also indicate that the larger the farm the larger the inefficiency and that growing barley is more inefficient than wheat

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

returns to scale and damages to scale under natural and managerial disposability strategy efficiency and competitiveness of petroleum firms environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue all over the world this study discusses how to use data environment analysis dea for environmental assessment for planning corporate strategy and international competitiveness an important feature of dea environmental assessment is that it classifies outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because all private and public entities produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the two types of output unification for dea environmental assessment by using a non radial model one of the two output unifications is that it considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability the other unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of strategy is referred to as managerial disposability both unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs after developing the two concepts on disposability this study theoretically explores how to measure returns to scale rts under natural disposability and damages to scale dts under managerial disposability to document the practicality of the proposed approach this study applies it to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil companies this study identifies four important findings on the petroleum industry first national oil companies outperform international oil companies in the unified efficiency under natural disposability second international oil companies outperform national oil companies in the unified efficiency under managerial disposability third national oil firms exhibit a mixed result on rts while international oil firms exhibit decreasing rts finally both national and international oil companies exhibit increasing dts implying that all oil firms need to decrease their operational sizes for improving their environmental performance on co2 emission as an alternative strategy the result suggests that they need to introduce technology innovation e g clean air technology into their business operations the technology based strategy has more practicality than the size reduction in their operations

environmental assessment by dea radial measurement u s coal fired power plants in iso independent system operator and rto regional transmission organization abstract the economic concept of weak and strong disposability on undesirable outputs dominated the previous discussions on dea data envelopment analysis radial measurement for environmental assessment this study reexamines the economic concept from the perspective of corporate strategies on how to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the economic concept of disposability conventionally accepted by production economists is replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy that a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector the firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation meanwhile the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change on undesirable outputs as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified operational and environmental performance by utilizing new technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two types of disposability this study discusses how to measure unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability by dea radial models to document the practicality of the proposed dea environmental assessment this study applies it to compare the performance of u s coal fired power plants under isos rtos independent system operators regional transmission organizations with that of the other power plants not belonging to any organization this study identifies two empirical findings one of the two findings is that the latter coal fired power plants outperform the former power plants belonging to isos rtos in terms of three efficiency measures this result indicates that isos and rtos do not provide an effective coordination for coal fired power plants at the level that can be found in the other power plants the other finding is that there is technological improvement in the operation of coal fired power plants

measuring the effect of economic growth on countries environmental efficiency a conditional directional distance function approach using a recently developed probabilistic approach of a conditional directional distance function we measure the effect of economic growth on countries environmental efficiency in carbon dioxide emissions for a sample of 99 countries over the period of 1980 2010 our approach directly accounts for the exogenous factors influencing countries environmental production therefore we do not impose the separability condition on the estimated environmental efficiencies when examining the entire sample as well as the sample of developed countries our results reveal an inverted u shaped relationship between countries gdp per capita and environmental efficiency however when examining the relationship for the sample of developing countries the results reveal an n shaped form moreover our results show that countries ratifying the kyoto protocol tend to have higher efficiency scores implying that their mitigation activity is less costly

estimating the shadow prices of so2 and nox for u s coal power plants a convex nonparametric least squares approach abstract weak disposability between outputs and pollutants defined as a simultaneous proportional reduction of both outputs and pollutants assumes that pollutants are byproducts of the output generation process and that a firm can freely dispose of both by scaling down production levels leaving some inputs idle based on the production axioms of monotonicity convexity and weak disposability we formulate a convex nonparametric least squares cnls quadratic optimization problem to estimate a frontier production function assuming either a deterministic disturbance term consisting only of inefficiency or a composite disturbance term composed of both inefficiency and noise the suggested methodology extends the stochastic semi nonparametric envelopment of data stoned described in kuosmanen and kortelainen 2011 applying the method to estimate the shadow prices of so 2 and no x generated by u s coal power plants we conclude that the weak disposability stoned method provides more consistent estimates of market prices

returns to scale in convex production technologies the notion of returns to scale rts is well established in data envelopment analysis dea in the variable returns to scale production technology the rts characterization is closely related to other scale characteristics such as the scale elasticity most productive scale size mpss and global rts types indicative of the direction to mpss in recent years a number of alternative production technologies have been developed in the dea literature most of these technologies are polyhedral and hence are closed and convex sets examples include technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs models with weight restrictions and production trade offs technologies that include several component production processes and network dea models for most of these technologies the relationship between rts and other scale characteristics has remained unexplored the theoretical results obtained in this paper establish such relationships for a very large class of closed convex technologies of which polyhedral technologies are an important example

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

a critique of non parametric efficiency analysis in energy economics studies abstract the paper reexamines non additive environmental efficiency models with weakly disposable undesirable outputs appeared in the literature of energy economics these efficiency models are used in numerous studies published in this journal and other energy related outlets recent studies however have found key limitations of the weak disposability assumption in its application to environmental efficiency analysis it is found that efficiency scores obtained from non additive efficiency models can be non monotonic in pollution quantities under the weak disposability assumption which is against common intuition and the principle of environmental economics in this paper i present taxonomy of efficiency models found in the energy economics literature and illustrate the above limitations and discuss implications of monotonicity from a practical viewpoint finally i review the formulations for a variable returns to scale technology with weakly disposable undesirable outputs which has been misused in a number of papers in the energy economics literature an application to evaluating the energy efficiencies of 23 european union states is presented to illustrate the problem

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

increasing agricultural productivity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in sub saharan africa myth or reality the motivation for this study stems from two major concerns that are interlinked the first is the decades long food insecurity crisis faced by sub saharan african ssa countries which is still prevalent the second is the negative impact greenhouse gas ghg emissions from agriculture may have on future food production and which is likely to worsen the food insecurity problem the conundrum ssa farmers face is how to increase food output through productivity growth while minimizing ghg emissions to measure changes in productivity growth and ghg emissions this study evaluates the agricultural performance of 18 ssa countries by utilizing the malmquist luenberger index to incorporate good and bad outputs for the years 1980 2012 the empirical evidence demonstrates that productivity is overestimated when bad outputs are not considered in the production model the analysis provides a better understanding of the effectiveness of previous mitigation methods and which informs an appropriate course of action needed to achieve the twin objectives of increasing agriculture productivity while reducing ghg emissions

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

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

pesticide use environmental spillovers and efficiency a dea risk adjusted efficiency approach applied to dutch arable farming pesticides are widely used by crop producers in developed countries to combat risk associated with pests and diseases however their indiscriminate use can lead to various environmental spillovers that may alter the agricultural production environment thus contributing to production risk this study utilises a data envelopment analysis dea approach to measure performance of arable farms incorporating pesticides environmental spillovers and output variance as undesirable outputs in the efficiency analysis and taking explicitly into account the effect of pesticides and other inputs on production risk the application focuses on panel data from dutch arable farms over the period 2003 2007 a moment approach is used to compute output variance providing empirical representations of the risk increasing or decreasing nature of the used inputs finally shadow values of risk adjusted inputs are computed we find that pesticides are overused in dutch arable farming and there is a considerable evidence of the need for decreasing pesticides environmental spillovers

population economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency evidence from u s states we apply a conditional directional distance function allowing multiple exogenous factors to measure environmental performance we evaluate the air pollution performance levels of u s states for the years 1998 and 2008 states environmental inefficiency is determined by population size and gdp per capita gdppc the overall results reveal that there is much variation in environmental inefficiencies among the u s states a second stage nonparametric analysis indicates a nonlinear relationship between states population size gdppc levels and states environmental inefficiency levels our results indicate that environmental inefficiency on the whole decreases with increased population and income per capita but there are limits to this improvement and at high income and population levels the tendency may reverse

a multiplicative environmental dea approach to measure efficiency changes in the world s major polluters we propose a multiplicative environmental data envelopment analysis me dea approach to measure the performance of 46 countries that generate most of the world s carbon dioxide co2 emissions in the model we combine economic labour and capital environmental freshwater and energy inputs with a desirable output gdp and three undesirable outputs co2 methane and nitrous oxide emissions we rank each country according to the optimum use of its resources employing a multiplicative extension of environmental dea models by computing partial efficiency scores for each input and output separately we thus identify major sources of inefficiency for all sample countries based on the partial efficiency scores obtained from the model we define aggregate economic energy and environmental efficiency indexes for 2002 2007 and 2011 reflecting points in time before and after the official enactment of the kyoto protocol we find that for most countries efficiency scores increase over this period in addition there exists a positive relationship between economic and environmental efficiency although at the same time our results suggest that environmental efficiency cannot be realized without first reaching a certain threshold of economic efficiency we also find support for the paradox of plenty whereby an abundance of natural and energy resources results in their inefficient use

real business cycles and the animal spirits hypothesis abstract we calibrate a quantitative equilibrium macroeconomic model with an aggregate technology that is subject to increasing returns and show that this model may display fluctuations at business cycle frequencies even when there are no shocks to the fundamentals of the economy these fluctuations are due to the self fulfilling beliefs of investors which we call animal spirits we compare the impulse response functions predicted by our model and by two other more standard models with a four variable vector autoregression on u s data our animal spirits economy is the most successful of the three at matching broad features of the dynamic responses in the data journal of economic literature classification numbers e00 e3 e32

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