Environmental Sustainability of Road Transport in OECD Countries

Fei Mo and Derek Wang
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Fei Mo: School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Derek Wang: Business School, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing 100070, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 18, 1-14

Abstract: Road transport is a primary source of various forms of air pollution and climate-impacting emissions, and contains huge potential for improving the environment and combating climate change. This paper studies the environmental sustainability of road transport for a set of OECD countries over the period 2000–2014. We capture the sustainability performance of road transport in two data envelopment analysis (DEA) models, corresponding to the concepts of natural disposability and managerial disposability, respectively. Air pollution and carbon emissions are treated as undesirable outputs. The models produce two unified measures of environmental sustainability performance, accounting for transport activities and environmental impacts simultaneously. We find that the studied countries have improved their overall managerial disposability performance from 2000 to 2014, driven by technological progress and tightening regulations on fuel economy and vehicle emissions. The analysis enables us to identify best-practice and laggard countries in transport sustainability.

Keywords: sustainability; road transport; DEA; OECD; transport efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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