Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a pandemic around the world and has huge impacts on our economic and social systems, particularly on the healthcare system and the transportation and energy sectors. To examine a relationship between healthcare and energy sectors in the COVID-19 era, we propose a holistic application of Data Envelopment Analysis for Environmental Assessment (DEA-EA) to assess the COVID-19 response performance of 33 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations and investigate whether health insurance systems contribute to the performance. We also associate the performance with mobility, which is an energy consumption measure, to test the relationship through statistical analyses. In the DEA-EA, particularly, this study incorporates undesirable outputs (i.e., the number of confirmed cases and that of deaths) as well as desirable outputs (i.e., the number of total recovered people and that of total tested people) during April 2020 as the initial stage of COVID-19. While the former outputs need to be maximized, the latter ones need to be minimized in the assessment of healthcare system performance. This study finds that (a) the COVID-19 response performance of countries is varying and those with higher public health coverage have outperformed others with lower public coverage in terms of combating the COVID-19 outbreak, and (b) the healthcare system performance is significantly associated with mobility. Particularly, the second finding indicates that outperforming nations in the healthcare system are returning to the normal (with less volatility) while underperforming ones are still stagnating in terms of mobility. It implies that outperforming countries need to prepare for continuous commitment to clean/sustainable energy transition.

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For more information on this publication, visit http://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD405.html Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2017 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark Limited Print and Electronic Distribution RightsThis document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.html.The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org iii AbstractThe objective of this dissertation is to better understand the contextual effects on the success of the transition of technologies generated through the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, and to pull out policy recommendations for facilitating the way the SBIR transitions technologies from abstract concepts to concrete engineering capabilities that the U.S. can use in its military systems. To that end, I explore how social (network), spatial (region), and industrial (technology) factors affect the SBIR's ability to do this. Specifically, I examine the contextual effects of network, regional, and industrial characteristics on the success of technology transition using various regression models. To incorporate multilevel factors, in particular, I employ hierarchical linear models with firm-and region/ industry-level variables related to state-level innovation capacity, anchor tenants, innovation brokers, technology life cycle, technology market, technological and network positions of SBIR awardees in relation to the DOD (including its research laboratories) and prime contractors.Findings of this dissertation include: small firms' larger SBIR awards, higher age, more cutting-edge technology or high-tech focus are more likely to lead to success in technology transition; small firms' higher technological distance (in particular, relative to prime contractors) and more central network position are more likely to facilitate technology transition; the number of defense labs in a state may matter in small firms' winning federal procurement contracts and improving their return on investment; the number of DOD mentors (i.e., large prime contractors who signed up for mentoring small busin...

Sustainable public procurement plays an important role in addressing not only environmental but also economic and social issues through government acquisitions from technology-based small suppliers. In this context, the objective of this study is to better understand the holistic public procurement process by assessing the operational efficiency of technology-based small suppliers and associating the economic aspect of public procurement with the social aspect, such as women-owned businesses. To this end, we analyzed U.S. Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research grantees by combining network data envelopment analysis with bootstrap truncated regression analysis. Drawing on the analysis results, we found that (1) there is heterogeneity in the performance of research and development, network building, and commercialization sub-processes, and (2) there is a positive relationship between the overall performance and women-owned small suppliers who excel particularly in network building. The former implies that small suppliers may have different expertise in the chain of public procurement; the latter suggests that woman entrepreneurs with a business network may be able to outperform their counterparts in the public procurement market.