banking technology and the existence of a consistent output aggregate abstract this paper addresses the question of the existence of a consistent output aggregate in banking specific necessary and sufficient conditions for output aggregation are developed and tested in the context of a second order approximation to any arbitrary multi product bank cost function the analysis provides evidence that a composite aggregate measure of output fails to provide a proper representation of banking technology and therefore previous studies that used aggregate output measures may well be subject to specification errors

a comprehensive eco efficiency model and dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china abstract in order to have a comprehensive eco efficiency measure which can incorporate productivity resource efficiency environmental efficiency and inter temporal comparability and circularity the paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model named gb us sbm model which combines global benchmark technology undesirable output super efficiency and slacks based measure using the gb us sbm model this paper investigates the dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china from 2000 to 2010 the empirical results show that the movement of average eco efficiency of china presents a v shape from 2000 to 2010 with the trough occurred in 2005 but there are big differences of eco efficiency among the regions for the growth of eco efficiency technological progress contributes 56 87 58 21 18 27 62 19 scale efficiency contributes 40 01 61 14 167 43 39 12 efficiency change contributes 3 82 19 99 63 40 2 16 to the eastern middle western and northeastern regions of china respectively these imply that there is a big space for western region to enhance its technological progress and huge space for the whole country to promote its management ability

regulating stock externalities under uncertainty abstract using a simple analytical model incorporating benefits of a stock costs of adjusting the stock and uncertainty in costs we uncover several important principles governing the choice of price based policies e g taxes relative to quantity based policies e g tradable permits for controlling stock externalities as in weitzman rev econom stud 41 4 1974 477 the relative slopes of the marginal benefits and costs of controlling the externality continue to be critical determinants of the efficiency of prices relative to quantities with flatter marginal benefits and steeper marginal costs favoring prices but some important adjustments for dynamic effects are necessary including correlation of cost shocks across time discounting stock decay and the rate of benefits growth applied to the problem of greenhouse gases and climate change we find that a price based instrument generates several times the expected net benefits of a quantity instrument

assessing regional eco efficiency from the perspective of resource environmental and economic performance in china a bootstrapping approach in global data envelopment analysis abstract eco efficiency has been receiving increasing attention across the world this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model which combines global benchmark technology directional distance function and a bootstrapping approach to investigate the dynamic trends of regional eco efficiency in china from 2003 to 2014 moreover a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose the performance fluctuations into resource environmental and economic efficiency then the key factors responsible for the changes in eco efficiency are explored using the global malmquist luenberger index the empirical results demonstrate an upward trend of eco efficiency in china during the study period this trend was high in eastern and northern areas but low in northwestern areas however it should be noted that some eco efficient regions still consume much land water and energy and emit much environmental pollutants in absolute terms the whole of china performs well on the economic front while resource and environmental performances are not encouraging particularly on environmental efficiency the eastern and northern regions have experienced the greatest advances in both resource and environmental efficiency while the undeveloped areas have not shown much progress which further widens the gaps between developed areas and undeveloped areas the decomposition of productivity growth indicates that technical progress is the decisive factor in promoting china s eco efficiency while decreasing management level is the major obstacle hampering the improvement in eco efficiency

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

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

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

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

correlated uncertainty and policy instrument choice abstract for two decades environmental economists have generally maintained that benefit uncertainty is irrelevant for choosing between price and quantity instruments but that cost uncertainty matters with the identity of the efficient instrument depending upon the relative slopes of the marginal benefit and cost functions but in the presence of simultaneous correlated uncertainty such policy instrument recommendations may be inappropriate with plausible values of relevant parameters the conventional identification of a price instrument will be reversed to favor instead a quantity instrument the opposite reversal from the choice of a quantity instrument to a price instrument seems less likely to occur

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

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

scale and scope economies in the multi product banking firm abstract the multi product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function this analysis indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom natural monopoly scale economies and product specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry there is however evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope the implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested

economies of scale in building societies this paper presents new measurements of economies of scale in the building society industry by estimating a translog total cost function jointly with the derived input cost share equations it differs from previous building society studies by defining total cost to include the interest cost of borrowed funds as well as the operating costs of employing labour and capital services in addition to the usual elasticity three further scale economy measures are developed and estimated input specific economies of scale augmented economies of scale and augmented input specific economies of scale

malmquist productivity index decompositions a unifying framework in two widely cited but unpublished working papers simar and wilson 1998 and zofio and lovell 1998 proposed an alternative decomposition of the malmquist productivity index which retained what seemed to be the strongholds of previous proposals with regard to the contribution of technological and efficiency change to productivity change namely a technical change term with regard to the best practice variable returns to scale vrs technology which is to be found in ray and desli 1997 and a scale efficiency change term that illustrates a firm s situation with regard to optimal scale benchmark technology fare et al 1994 attaining this objective required the introduction of an additional term in the malmquist productivity index decomposition which would reflect the scale bias of technical change it is our objective to provide economic rationale for this term within a theory of production context the existing decompositions and recent articles that further elaborate on this issue the ide

industrial eco efficiency regional disparity and spatial convergence of china s regions abstract in this study the industrial eco efficiency measures of 30 chinese provinces municipalities and autonomous regions from 2001 to 2015 were estimated based on a proposed data envelopment analysis dea model and the non convex metafrontier undesirable outputs super efficiency slacks based measure ncmeta us sbm which simultaneously incorporates non convex metafrontier technology undesirable outputs and super efficiency into slacks based measure subsequently dynamic spatial econometric models were employed to test the spatial convergence of industrial eco efficiency the empirical results show that 1 the average value of industrial eco efficiency was the highest in the eastern region 0 67 followed by the western region 0 30 and central region 0 27 indicating the existence of a significant regional disparity 2 strong evidence for global and club spatial convergence of industrial eco efficiency was found with regard to regional heterogeneity provinces in the eastern region converged faster than those in the central and western regions while the convergence speed of industrial eco efficiency increased after 2008 with respect to temporal heterogeneity 3 the ownership structure appeared to have a higher impact on industrial eco efficiency than other controls in the presence of spatial conditional convergence these findings are robust with regard to both spatial econometric model and spatial weighting matrix specifications based on the empirical analysis the following policies promote industrial eco efficiency in china have been recommended first relevant authorities must take effective measures to encourage the central western regions to adopt clean energy technologies the energy subsidy policies should strive to break through the technological lock in and turn to regional green development second full advantage of the spatial effects must be taken and technological exchanges and cooperation among neighboring areas must be strengthened to ensure that the industrial eco efficiency of the central and western regions converge with those of the eastern coastal areas policy implications of multidimensional heterogeneity and adjustment of industrial structure should be highlighted while promoting industrial eco efficiency finally it is crucial to emphasize factors such as foreign direct investment fdi ownership and industrial structures to attract fdi and optimize the current industrial structure

regional low carbon economy efficiency in china analysis based on the super sbm model with co2 emissions abstract as the largest energy consumer and co 2 emitting country the chinese government is committing to a low carbon economy it is meaningful and contributes to evaluate and analyze the low carbon economy efficiency lcee of china a super slack based measure super sbm model with undesirable outputs as combined with the malmquist productivity index is proposed to measure the lcee and the dynamic low carbon economy efficiency dlcee of 30 provinces in mainland china from 2005 to 2012 the theil index is also used to measure the rationalization level of industrial structure rlis for discussing the improvements to the lcee in china the results indicate that the proposed undesirable outputs super sbm model can effectively rank the sbm ef cient provinces china s regional economic development does not follow a low carbon pattern with an average lcee of 0 517 as a whole the china s economic development is gradually following a low carbon development pattern with an annual lcee improvement of 4 5 the rlis of china is also gradually changing better as well through a comparative analysis of the lcee and rlis the 30 provinces are divided into three sub areas and relevant suggestions are presented for improving the lcee of different sub areas in the future

regional heterogeneity of china s energy efficiency in new normal a meta frontier super sbm analysis abstract this study aims at investigating regional heterogeneity of china s energy efficiency in the new normal a model combining meta frontier method and super sbm is proposed which has higher discriminatory power under the group frontier the energy efficiencies of the eastern central western and northeastern china and each provinces were estimated during 2006 2016 we also discussed the technology gaps of different regions the changes in energy efficiency and the main influencing factors of energy efficiency the results show that the highest energy efficiency lied in eastern china surprisingly the technology levels of central and western china have improved rapidly furthermore as china enters a new normal period more regions showed a strong decoupling relationship between energy consumption and economic growth meanwhile the regression results indicate that both state intervention and market openness had negative impacts on energy efficiency in different study periods finally according to the local conditions of different regions several policy recommendations to promote china s regional energy efficiency improvement are proposed

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

ecological total factor energy efficiency of regions in china most existing energy efficiency indices are computed without taking into account undesirable outputs such as co2 and so2 emissions this paper computes the ecological total factor energy efficiency etfee of 30 regions in china for the period 2005 2009 through the slack based model sbm with undesirable outputs we calculate the etfee index by comparing the target energy input obtained from sbm with undesirable outputs to the actual energy input findings show that china s regional etfee still remains a low level of around 0 600 and regional energy efficiency is overestimated by more than 0 100 when not looking at environmental impacts china s regional energy efficiency is extremely unbalanced the east area ranks first with the highest etfee of above 0 700 the northeast and central areas follow and the west area has the lowest etfee of less than 0 500 a monotone increasing relation exists between the area s etfee and china s per capita gdp the truncated regression model shows that the ratio of r d expenditure to gdp and the degree of foreign dependence have positive impacts whereas the ratio of the secondary industry to gdp and the ratio of government subsidies for industrial pollution treatment to gdp have negative effects on the etfee

scale economies in banking a restructuring and reassessment the issue of scale economies in banking has a rich history most earlier studies report modest operating cost scale economies for small institutions those with less than about 50 million of deposits in 1968 dollars but are unclear where these economies might end if at all unfortunately these studies are limited in four important respects first those that were well specified did not measure the total cost of banking operations but concentrated on estimating scale economies for individual banking functions e g demand deposits separately from commercial loans second an average cost curve that could take a u shape over the full range of banks was not fitted either because larger banks were not included or because of the functional form used cobb douglas consequently the optimum or minimum cost size of a bank or office could not be determined third the variables measuring the costs of branching were misspecified fourth the branch

economies of scale and economies of scope in multiproduct financial institutions a study of british columbia credit unions this paper investigates the production technology facing computerized credit unions in canada a full system of translog cost equations is estimated in order to test for economies of scale economies of scope and other production characteristics in a multiproduct context the regression results indicate that most of the credit unions in our sample experience significant increasing returns to scale as they expand their level of output there is also evidence of cost complementarity or economies of scope in their mortgage and other lending activities as a result legislation which limits the ability of credit unions to grow and diversify will likely raise the operating costs of this important group of financial institutions additional structural tests of the most general translog specification suggest that none of the restrictive production conditions commonly imposed by other researchers using cobb douglas and ces specifications provide a valid representation of credit union technology the results of many earlier studies are therefore open to question this paper presents a number of structural tests of the production technology facing large computerized credit unions in canada a full system of translog cost equations is estimated using detailed cross sectional data on british columbia credit unions the parameter estimates obtained from our multiproduct specification allow us to test for economies of scale economies of scope and factor substitution unlike many earlier studies the present paper introduces the various outputs as separate variables instead of crudely proxying them with a single output measure such as total assets the total number of loans or the number of depositors by explicitly recognizing the multiproduct nature of the intermediation process we are able to address more interesting production questions and remove some of the bias caused by misspecification and measurement error in simpler approaches the flexible translog specification allows us to estimate the sensitivity of costs to proportionate increases in all outputs economies of scale as well as the cost savings firms realize by producing several outputs jointly rather than specializing in the production of one economies of scope the test results reported in the latter part of the paper suggest that increasing returns to scale exist in almost all of the credit unions in our sample though

cost structure and technical change in rural banking abstract using the multi product translog cost function this paper examines the cost structure and technical change occurring within the novel ghanaian rural banks the results of the seemingly unrelated error components model indicate substantial unexploited economies of scale in individual products as well as in overall intermediation there is presence of pairwise complementarity between loans and government securities and between deposits and government securities but absence of pairwise complementarity between loans and deposits overall capital using and labour saving technical change has occurred but efficiency loss in deposit mobilization outweighs the efficiency gains in government securities and lending activities operation of agencies reinforces the overall efficiency loss the rural banks must not be hindered from expanding but in any growth strategy deposit mobilization should take a central position and the cost of operating agencies watched closely

the technical efficiency of us banks abstract the paper uses a non parametric frontier approach to measure the technical efficiency of a sample of u s banks the results indicate that these banks could have produced the same level of output with only 70 of the inputs actually used in addition most of this inefficiency is due to pure technical inefficiency wasting inputs rather than scale inefficiency operating at non constant returns to scale finally regression analysis indicates that the technical efficiency of the banks is positively related to size negatively related to product diversity and not at all related to the extent to which branch banking is allowed

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

takeover activity among financial mutuals an analysis of target characteristics abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of the merger process among mutuals using a large pooled cross section time series sample of uk building societies between 1981 and 1993 the financial services industry is probably unique in having a substantial mutual sector coexisting with and competing against joint stock firms however given the severely attenuated system of ownership claims in the financial mutual it has been widely predicted that this form will exhibit strong behavioural differences from the stock sector it is surprising therefore that despite the important governance role accorded to mergers in the corporate literature the merger process among financial mutuals has been almost totally ignored this paper explores the mutual merger process via an examination of the targets characteristics it finds little support for the natural selection view of mutual acquisitions but it does reveal the importance of the regulatory process above all the results show a surprising similarity to those from studies of the merger process in joint stock firms

eco efficiency of the western taiwan straits economic zone an evaluation based on a novel eco efficiency model and empirical analysis of influencing factors abstract obtaining the most economic benefits while using the least resources and causing the least environmental damage is an urgent and key problem in achieving sustainable development the concept of eco efficiency provides a comprehensive perspective for observing and solving this problem this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model named the win us sbm as a comprehensive eco efficiency evaluation method that can accommodate undesirable outputs all the identification problems of decision making units dmus possible slacks of variables and the problems of an insufficient number of available dmus and intertemporal comparability china s western taiwan straits economic zone wts economic zone is an important regional economic growth center by applying win us sbm and arcgis software we investigated data on the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of eco efficiency in the wts economic zone for the years 2009 2016 later the global malmquist luenberger index was used to decompose the sources of growth in eco efficiency finally the main driving factors of eco efficiency were explored through a tobit regression analysis the empirical results show that 1 the overall eco efficiency of the wts economic zone had greatly improved increasing by 11 46 annually and the cumulative growth rate of eco efficiency was 110 84 from 2009 to 2016 2 the eastern area had the highest average eco efficiency followed by the western area and the middle area in that order also the growth rate of the middle area ranked first 16 68 whereas the eastern area had the slowest growth in eco efficiency 7 22 3 on the whole the growth of eco efficiency was driven mainly by technological progress and was restricted by the decrease in management level which implies that policy makers should focus on improving management and technical levels 4 high levels of economic development population density market openness and industrial structure had positive effects on the eco efficiency of the wts economic zone whereas energy intensity and expenditure on science and technology had negative impacts

co2 emissions reduction of chinese light manufacturing industries a novel ram based global malmquist luenberger productivity index climate change has become one of the most challenging issues facing the world chinese government has realized the importance of energy conservation and prevention of the climate changes for sustainable development of china s economy and set targets for co2 emissions reduction in china in china industry contributes 84 2 of the total co2 emissions especially manufacturing industries data envelopment analysis dea and malmquist productivity mp index are the widely used mathematical techniques to address the relative efficiency and productivity of a group of homogenous decision making units e g industries or countries however in many real applications especially those related to energy efficiency there are often undesirable outputs e g the pollutions waste and co2 emissions which are produced inevitably with desirable outputs in the production this paper introduces a novel malmquist luenberger productivity mlp index based on directional distance function ddf to address the issue of productivity evolution of dmus in the presence of undesirable outputs the new ram range adjusted measure based global mlp index has been applied to evaluate co2 emissions reduction in chinese light manufacturing industries recommendations for policy makers have been discussed

malmquist indices of productivity growth during the deregulation of norwegian banking 1980 89 productivity growth during the deregulation of the norwegian banking industry is studied within the framework of data envelopment analysis which explicitly allows for multiple outputs introducing malmquist indices for productivity growth total growth can be decomposed into frontier growth and change in each bank s distance to the frontier both the total growth index and its components can be consistently chained over time we find productivity regress at the average bank prior to the deregulation but rapid growth when deregulation took place deregulation also led to less dispersion of productivity levels within the industry

managing partially protected resources under uncertainty it is common wisdom that open access leads to the inefficient use of resources and private ownership of resources improves efficiency however the impact of enclosure and efficient management of some resource pools on other open access resource pools is poorly recognized the problem is common to many congestion prone facilities including roads parks fisheries antibiotics grazing lands and wilderness areas in this paper we analyze the optimality of price and quantity instruments in regulating resource use when there is uncertainty about congestion costs price instruments are found to be preferable to quantity instruments and strictly so when demand is less than perfectly elastic we also explore the effect of market power by resource owners on the relative efficiency of the two instruments

the effects of circular economy on economic growth a quasi natural experiment in china abstract this study aims to assess the impact of circular economy on economic growth in the process of rapid economic growth china has been facing with the pressure of insufficient supply of resources and environmental pollution which makes the development model of circular economy ce an imperative transformation china has carried out two batches of ce pilot cities to promote the construction of ecological economy and change the traditional economic development model which is employed as a quasi natural experiment in this study the effect of this ce policy on the local economic growth is explored using the propensity score matching psm method and difference in differences did model and a panel data of 163 chinese cities from the year of 2001 2012 has been used the results show that the growth rate of gdp of the pilot cities decreases significantly but the economic decline gradually recovers as time goes on in addition this study further conducts the regional heterogeneity analysis to compare the economic growth of ce pilot cities in three economic zones i e eastern central and western economic zones and the sectoral heterogeneity analysis to compare the economic growth of three main industries i e primary secondary and tertiary industries finally discussion of above results is presented and recommendations for the promotion of urban ce are proposed

commercial fisheries under price uncertainty abstract the deterministic models applied in economics of fisheries are extended to comprise price uncertainty and risk aversion among the fishing units it is proved that in the open access fishery both the total fishing effort and the number of fishing units are reduced as the variance of the price increases that the total fishing effort may be smaller in the open access fishery than in the optimal fishery at a high variance that only a fixed producer price system can create a first best optimum and that a tax on revenue is more efficient than both fishing unit quotas or tax on catch

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 1978 this article total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 78 was reprinted with permission from the december 1982 issue of the economic journal this article proposes a methodology that decomposes total factor productivity change into two distinct elements technological progress and changes in technical efficiency technological progress is defined as the change in the best practice production frontier all other productivity change is attributed to technical efficiency change the article provides a theoretical framework for decomposing total factor productivity growth as well as a specification and estimation of the deterministic frontier production function it employs a programming technique to estimate a flexible functional form of the production frontier the paper then applies this technique to empirical data from yugoslavia of the period from 1965 to 1978 it concludes that for yugoslavia improvements to technical efficiency comprise the dominant contribution to total factor productivity change this agrees with accumulating evidence that in many developing economies productivity gain due to technological mastery of imported technology is substantial

technical change organizational form and the structure of bank production of those technological characteristics related to the nature of competition among firms in an industry or market scale economies and technical change are especially important economies of scale are said to exist when an equiproportional increase in all inputs results in a greater than proportional increase in output or equivalently when an increase in output at constant input prices leads to a less than proportional increase in total costs thus average costs decline as output expands depending upon the extent to which costs decline as output increases regulation of the firms in the industry may be necessary l the literature analyzing scale economies in commercial banking is voluminous the early studies on scale economies in banking include those by benston 1965 1972 greenbaum 1967 murphy 1972 and bell and murphy 1968 more recent studies include those by benston hanweck and humphrey 1982 and clark 1984 2 this literature has established that mild scale economies exist in bank

technical scale and allocative efficiencies in u s banking an empirical investigation a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall technical pure technical allocative and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks the sample was drawn from the federal deposit insurance corporation tapes on the reports of condition and reports of income call reports for the year 1986 the results indicated a low level of overall efficiency the main source of inefficiency was technical in nature rather than allocative separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching however the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non branching banks were not found to be different

the productivity effects of bank mergers evidence from the uk building societies abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of acquisition activity on financial intermediary productivity specifically it uses an augmented production function approach to investigate the impact of acquisition after controls for input changes the model is estimated on an unbalanced panel of 93 uk building societies over the period 1981 1993 using data on their core financial intermediation activities which it is suggested are particularly appropriate for our purposes in contrast to much of the existing merger literature which for the most part uses financial performance data our results do indicate significant and substantial productivity gains following acquisition these are consistent with an acquisitions process in which less efficient firms are acquired and reorganized the post merger gains appear to increase substantially in the post deregulation period when pressures to minimize cost are widely considered to have increased

tax versus quota regulation a stochastic model of the fishery in a deterministic setting it has been demonstrated that taxes and quotas can be equivalent regulatory instruments and that both can in principle induce an optimal allocation of resources in markets where externalities are problematic in this paper we consider growth harvest and demand uncertainty within the context of canada s pacific halibut fishery and find that while taxes remain the preferred instrument the welfare losses arising from the use of individual boat quotas are minor

indirect methods for regulating externalities under uncertainty it is sometimes necessary or appropriate to correct an externality by intervening in the market for a privately traded commodity with which the externality is linked in these situations ad valorem taxation is a viable policy option it is argued that some combination of specific and ad valorem taxes will always outperform regulations which fix price administratively but that quantity standards may outperform taxes the analysis is applied to a problem in international trade

eco efficiency measurement of industrial sectors in china a hybrid super efficiency dea analysis abstract eco efficiency is of great significance in the attainment of a sustainable society and is the most severe issue facing industrial sectors in china in this work a hybrid super efficiency data envelopment analysis dea was conducted to measure eco efficiency and analyze the problem of inefficiency facing industrial sectors in china dea has been widely used in eco efficiency analysis however existing dea models focus on the evolution and comparison of eco efficiency values and do not consider the evolution characteristics of the input nor undesirable output inefficiency and neglect the radial and non radial classifications of input and output indices simultaneously thus this work proposes a hybrid super efficiency dea model which combines hybrid dea with super efficiency dea separating the input and undesirable output variables into radial and non radial parts using variable correlations for the panel data of the industrial sectors the malmquist index is introduced in this approach subsequently this approach is illustrated using a real data set from 22 industrial sectors in china corresponding to the period of 2006 2015 results show that eco efficiencies of the 22 industrial sectors increased consistently from 2006 to 2015 due to a lack of momentum in sustained growth technological progress regarding the improvement of eco efficiency requires acceleration more and more sectors have achieved rapid enhancements in input and undesirable output inefficiencies but 10 traditional sectors with high resource consumption and heavy emissions of pollutants remain inefficient

data envelopment analysis for unified efficiency evaluation an assessment of regional industries in china abstract data envelopment analysis has recently gained popularity and attention in operational and environmental assessment a common feature of previous studies is decreasing an input vector to decrease the vector of undesirable outputs which is referred to as natural disposability however little research has considered how to increase the amount of capital input for clean production technology to decrease the amount of undesirable outputs in a data envelopment analysis framework which is referred to as managerial disposability thus this paper proposes an improved approach that considers measuring unified operational and environmental efficiency for managerial disposability and compares this approach with the one for natural disposability the proposed approach provides a positive strategy to reduce undesirable outputs and improve unified efficiency through increasing capital investment in clean production technology a case study of regional industries in china in 2006 2010 utilizing this approach is also presented the empirical study shows that the unified efficiencies of regional industries in china have relatively high scores for managerial disposability and increasing capital investment is vital to achieve sustainable development in clean production technology

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

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

landing fees versus fish quotas the relative efficiency of landing fees versus quota controls to achieve given escapement levels is examined the criterion is profit per year over a given time horizon the model employed is a discrete version of the logistic model where growth is influenced by a random variable simulations are used to compare landing fees and quota controls under imprecise stock estimates variable availability of fish and random fish prices while ecological uncertainty combined with imprecise stock estimates favors fee control as shown byweitzman the opposite can be the case under uncertainty about the availability of fish or fish price

approach paths to the steady state a performance test of current period decision rule solution methods for models of renewable resource management this paper compares the perfor mance of approximately optimal current period analytical solution methods for models of re newable resource management focus is placed on linear quadratic analytical dynamic pro gramming and on steady state based current period decision rules based on taylor s series approximation of the value function these are compared against an intertemporal decision rule used with backward induction in the context of a discrete time stylized model of the northern anchovy fishery of california decision rules based on taylor s series track the optimal ap proach path very well with social surplus less than one percent below the optimum surplus in comparison the linear quadratic formulation failed to track the optimal path as well with social surplus of more than seven percent below the optimum these results are interesting in light of the common conviction that approximat ing the value function with a taylor s series is not appropriate for discrete time renewable re source modeling

controlling stock externalities in a common property fishery subject to uncertainty abstract two methods are examined for regulating stock externalities under uncertainty quotas and taxes dynamic programming is used to characterize the externalities precisely the accuracy with which the current size of the resource stock can be monitored is found to be of crucial importance in the choice between tax and quota regulation if the current stock is observed without error taxes are capable of outperforming any quota

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

the optimal tax for maximum economic yield fishery regulation under rational expectations abstract this paper examines the optimal tax to achieve maximum economic yield mey exploitation in a rational expectations model of a competitive open access fishery to analyze the dynamic evolution of resource use a structural model which explains the relationship between the firm and the industry is presented the unregulated equilibrium is contrasted with the potential mey conditions under which the unregulated equilibrium will be mey are explored in addition a tax is devised which will cause non mey competitive exploitation to become mey when the tax is implemented