Waste Performance of NUTS 2-regions in the EU: A Conditional Directional Distance Benefit-of-the-Doubt Model

Nicky Rogge, Simon De Jaeger and Carolien Lavigne

Ecological Economics, 2017, vol. 139, issue C, 19-32

Abstract: This paper attempts to benchmark the municipal solid waste (MSW) management performance of the NUTS 2-regions in the EU by constructing a composite indicator. In order to account for commensurability, weighting and aggregation issues of the performance indicators in regional waste and materials' management, this paper advocates a conditional directional distance version of the Benefit-of-the-Doubt weighting technique. In addition, the waste management hierarchy defined by the EU is strongly embedded in the construction of our composite indicator. The results reveal considerable differences in the aggregate performance of the regions, even within Member States. In general, waste sectors of the NUTS 2-regions in Austria, Belgium, and Germany generally do well in terms of MSW management. Our results also reveal that some differences in the operating environment of the regions, such as the number of tourist overnight stays, are related to the aggregate performance of the regions. However, the observation that other conditions are not significantly related to the performance on a regional level is interesting as many policy makers frequently argue that the level of performance in their regions cannot be compared to that in other regions precisely due to this difference in operating conditions.

Keywords: Municipal solid waste; Management performance; Composite indicator; NUTS 2-regions Benefit-of-the-Doubt weighting; Conditional directional distance model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916306930
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:139:y:2017:i:c:p:19-32

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.03.021

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().