Assessment of national waste generation in EU Member States’ efficiency

George Halkos and Kleoniki Natalia Petrou

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Waste generation and management may be considered as either a by-product of economic actions or even used as input to economic activity like energy recovery. Every country produces different amounts of municipal solid waste (MSW) and with different composition. This paper deals with the efficiency of 28 EU Member States for the years 2008, 2010 and 2012 by employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and by using eight parameters, namely waste generation, employment rate, capital formation, GDP, population density and for the first time SOx, NOx and GHG emissions for the relevant countries. With these parameters six environmental production frameworks have been designed each with different inputs and outputs. The empirical analysis shows that overall the more efficient countries according to all frameworks include Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. These results were then reviewed against the recycling rate of each country for the examined time periods. The recycling rate actually depicts the DEA results, namely more efficient countries seem to have a higher recycling rate too. Moreover the DEA efficiency results were contrasted to the overall treatment options used in the countries under consideration. Overall it is noticed that countries employing all four treatment options with high use of more sustainable ones and decrease in the use of landfill are the ones that also proved to be efficient according to DEA.

Keywords: Environmental efficiency; waste generation; EU Member States; Data Envelopment Analysis; sustainability; environmental policy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 O13 O52 Q50 Q53 Q56 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ene and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:84590

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