Abstract
This study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for assessing economic success and environmental protection, so measuring the level of sustainability. The new approach is referred to as “DEA environmental assessment,” and it can measure the performance of various entities that use inputs to produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs. DEA models are generally classified into radial or non-radial category. This study proposes a new “intermediate” approach between them. As an illustrative application, this study is interested in empirical assessment on energy usage and social sustainability of 21 Asian nations from 2008 to 2014. The energy usage, usually classified into primal (e.g., oil and coal) and secondary (i.e., electricity) categories, is essential in developing the economy, but the development simultaneously produces various pollutions (e.g., carbon emission). They have been developing their economic prosperities in a short period, but simultaneously suffering from such pollutions. All Asian nations are classified into four or five groups based upon their unified efficiency measures under natural disposability, where economic performance is the first priority and environmental performance is the second, along with managerial disposability with the opposite priority to the natural disposability. An implication found in this study is that among Asian nations, Japan and New Zealand belong to the first tier in terms of developing their social sustainability. Japan’s economy started to turn down after 2012 and faced a pitfall in recent years. Meanwhile, New Zealand has developed its economy by exporting agriculture products and is surrounded by natural beauty. Thus, the two nations are ranked as the top tier under the four types of unified efficiency measures. Beside these expected findings, this study has found that large nations such as China and India have not badly performed if we consider the size of their economies. This is a surprising result because they are large carbon emitters in the world and thereby they have been often criticized by international communities. Their problem is that the living standard of people is low because of the size of population. The empirical findings are useful in developing the energy and industrial policies of Asian nations.
Highlights
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: http://ipcc.ch/index.htm), established within United Nations (UN) environmental program, reported the policy suggestion in April 2014 that it was necessary for us to reduce an amount of greenhouse gas Sueyoshi and Yuan Economic Structures (2018) 7:6(GHG) emissions, in particular CO2, by 40–70% until 2050 and to reduce them at the level of almost zero by the end of this twenty-first century via shifting the current systems to energy-efficient ones
A problem was that conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) documented a limited level of practicality in environmental assessment because it did not have a computational scheme to handle an existence of undesirable outputs
In reviewing the previous studies, we find that not many research efforts have examined the performance assessment on energy usage and sustainability in Asian nations even if they have been developing their economic prosperities in a short period, but simultaneously suffering from various pollution problems
Summary
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: http://ipcc.ch/index.htm), established within United Nations (UN) environmental program, reported the policy suggestion in April 2014 that it was necessary for us to reduce an amount of greenhouse gas Sueyoshi and Yuan Economic Structures (2018) 7:6. The position of this study is that this study develops a new intermediate approach, analytically locating between radial and non-radial approaches (Sueyoshi and Goto 2012), to examine the level of energy usage and sustainability development of 21 nations in Asia from 2008 to 2014. The proposed approach separates the magnitude of unified inefficiency (ξ) into ξg and ξg in the case of two components of the inefficiency measure Such a visual separation is specified in the two coordinates of Fig. 2. The ratio (AA′/OA), or ξ, indicates a magnitude of the directional vector of DMU {A} to improve the environmental performance in the two undesirable outputs. This study takes an average of these inefficiency components in formulations for the proposed intermediate model
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