Measuring the Sustainable Performance of Industrial and Commercial Service Industries in Taiwan

Abstract

This study proposed a performance model with slack-based measure under the meta-frontier framework, in order to assess the sustainable performance on industrial and service enterprises in Taiwan, after its 2009 Renewable Development Act. We observed that the sustainable performance had improved slightly due to energy-saving technologies and the low-carbon energy structure under the growth scale of Taiwan?s economy in the last decade. These were effective strategies for guiding industries with large quantity of CO2 emissions to improve their production activities, especially for the reduction of fossil fuel usage. We can draw several policy implications from the evaluation results. First, from the viewpoint of meta-frontier, because industrial sectors played an important role in CO2 emission, the government should aim to boost their pollution reduction performance. Second, since the electricity contributes to the most part of the energy consumption structure, switching to a low-carbon electricity supply portfolio would be necessary to decrease CO2 emissions. From the analysis, we could conclude that relying solely on the expansion of renewable energy capacity would not be the best antidote to CO2 reduction by considering the cost and other economic complications.