Environmental Productivity Change in World Air Emissions: A new Malmquist-Luenberger Index Approach

Juan Aparicio, Javier Barbero, Magdalena Kapelko, Jesus T. Pastor (jtpastor@umh.es) and José Zofío
Additional contact information
Jesus T. Pastor: Center of Operations Research (CIO), Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche

No JRC104083, JRC Research Reports from Joint Research Centre

Abstract: Over the last twenty years an accelerating number of studies have relied on the standard definition of the Malmquist-Luenberger index proposed by Chung et al. (1997) [J. Environ. Manage., 51 229-240], to assess environmental sensitive productivity change. While recent contributions have shown that it suffers from relevant drawbacks related to inconsistencies and infeasibilities, no one has studied systematically the performance of the original model, and to what extent the existing results are unreliable. This paper introduces the optimization techniques that allow implementing the first model solving these problems, and using a country level database including air pollutants, systematically compares the results obtained with both approaches. We discuss the relative number, magnitude and significance of the disparities that researchers should expect if resorting to the original model. Results show that inconsistencies and infeasibilities in the original model are increasing in the number of undesirable outputs included, reaching remarkable values that seriously question the reliability of results, and compromise any policy recommendation based on them.

Keywords: Malmquist-Luenberger Index; Technical Change; Data Envelopment Analysis; Computational Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D24 O47 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC104083 (application/pdf)

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:ipt:iptwpa:jrc104083

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in JRC Research Reports from Joint Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publication Officer (jrc-dir-b-publications@ec.europa.eu).