Assessment of the Energy Efficiency Improvement of Twenty-Five Countries: A DEA Approach

Abstract

Since energy efficiency and energy improvement are viewed as two of the most important keys of sustainable management, research on energy has become popular and captured much more attention. The current paper aimed to measure the energy efficiency of 25 countries with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as well as their energy efficiency improvement. First, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) slack-based model (SBM) was employed to obtain efficiency scores. Second, the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) was then used to examine the improvement during the period of 2010–2017. Findings of this study showed that developed countries had a more balanced development between gross domestic product (GDP) growth and CO2 emissions by using the same inputs as developing countries. Additionally, the findings revealed that India and China, being the two largest population countries, achieved improved energy intensity during 2010–2017; however; their energy consumption and CO2 emissions continued to grow, leading them to being the two worst countries in terms of energy efficiency.

Energy Efficiency Improvement Assessment in Africa: An Integrated Dynamic DEA Approach

“…The results of this study to a large extent confirm the findings of Liu and Liu [59], who estimated the energy performance of the top 20 CO 2 emitting nations. Wang et al [48] also obtained similar findings, assessing the energy efficiency of 25 nations. These findings are supported by Wang et al [60] and Zhou et al [70] who studied 17 nations and the APEC nations, respectively.…”

“…Elsewhere, there is a growing body of theoretical and empirical literature on energy efficiency that applies the DEA for several countries or regions; these include the US [45]; China [46][47][48][49]; India [50,51]; Japan [52]; and OECD countries [53,54]. In the African context, there exists a lacuna of energy efficiency studies using the data envelopment analysis approach, although there are some important energy efficiency studies in Africa [2,3,[55][56][57][58].…”

“…Lenz et al [61] investigated the energy efficiency dynamics among the European Union (EU) economies by adopting the SBM-DEA approach. Wang et al [48] used both the SBM model and MPI DEA framework to measure the energy efficiency of 25 countries by including CO 2 emission as a bad output. All the above studies are concentrated on developed and Asian countries, but none has been done from the perspective of African countries.…”

Quantifying Electricity Supply Resilience of Countries with Robust Efficiency Analysis

“…The same three air-pollutants were also analyzed by Camarero et al (2013) and they reached similar conclusions, with the exception that the eco-efficiency of NO x emissions did not improve [43]. Regarding energy efficiency improvements, Wang et al (2019) compared the CO 2 emissions in relation to GDP growth from 25 countries and found that India and China are the two worst countries in terms of energy efficiency [54]. A similar study focusing on energy recovery from waste for European Union (EU) member states was produced by Halkos and Petrou (2019) [47].…”

A DEA Approach for Assessing the Energy, Environmental and Economic Performance of Top 20 Industrial Countries

“…The environmental performance of investment in terms of renewable energy at the macroeconomic level in European countries was studied in [30]. Wang et al [31] measured the improvement in energy efficiency of twenty five countries using a slack-based DEA approach and Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI). The multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) DEA method was applied in [32] to construct a slacks-based composite indicator for 109 countries worldwide, and the authors of [33] evaluated the effect of clean energy use on total factor efficiencies of 87 countries from 2004 to 2010.…”