Evaluating the energy efficiency of European Union countries: The dynamic data envelopment analysis

Abstract

This study uses the dynamic data envelopment analysis model to evaluate the intertemporal efficiency and the executive efficiency based on fossil fuel CO2 emissions in European Union countries. European Union countries in pursuit of economic growth, taking into account the growth of gross domestic product may result in increased CO2 emissions, countries in order to reduce CO2 emissions to meet the target of the UN climate change conference in Paris 2015, in pursuit of gross domestic product growth and CO2 emission reduction targets. Whether the reduction of CO2 emissions will affect the overall efficiency of the country’s economic growth or not will make gross domestic product a major consideration in carryover variables in this study. This paper analyzes data of 28 selected European countries dating from 2009 to 2013 to study the effects of the undesirable output to the energy efficiency ranking. The variables in the model are the input variables: labor force, real capital stock, and energy consumption and the output variable is the undesirable output of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. In the model, the carryover intermediate activity is real gross domestic product. After the Paris Protocol formally replaced the Kyoto Protocol in 2015, the emphasis of this study is on the future state’s pursuit of economic growth, the gross domestic product as a variable in terms of intertemporal efficiency and using CO2 as a variable of undesirable output to analyze the relationship between national economic development and the greenhouse gas emissions for getting a policy indicator of the environmental protection and economic development.