Distinguishing Weak and Strong Disposability among Undesirable Outputs in DEA: The Example of the Environmental Efficiency of Chinese Coal-Fired Power Plants

Hongliang Yang () and Michael Pollitt

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Different from traditional efficiency research and previous studies considering undesirable outputs, this paper proposes models which distinguish weak and strong disposability features among various undesirable outputs based on the technical nature of the undesirable outputs. The paper illustrates the approach using a research sample covering 582 base-load Chinese coal-fired power plants in 2002. Our final results show that (1) imposing the technically correct disposability features on undesirable outputs makes a significant difference to the final efficiency evaluation. This suggests the necessity of properly distinguishing disposability features among undesirable outputs in efficiency models; (2) compared to their US and European counterparts, Chinese power plants relatively waste more resources. This suggests a great urgency for the Chinese electricity industry to improve its efficiency in coal-fired electricity generation sector.

Keywords: Economics: input-output analysis; Environment; Government: energy policies; Industries: electric; Statistics: nonparametric. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L94 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-eff, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.electricitypolicy.org.uk/pubs/wp/eprg0717.pdf Working Paper Version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.electricitypolicy.org.uk:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
Working Paper: Distinguishing Weak and Strong Disposability among Undesirable Outputs in DEA: The Example of the Environmental Efficiency of Chinese Coal-Fired Power Plants (2007)
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:cam:camdae:0741

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().