COVID-19 Response and Prospects of Clean/Sustainable Energy Transition in Industrial Nations: New Environmental Assessment

Abstract

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.

Environmental Assessment and Sustainable Development in the United States

“…It is hoped that our future studies will address those limitations. See [39][40][41][42] for a general direction on DEA applied to energy and environment.…”

Nonlinearity in the relationship between COVID-19 cases and carbon damages: controlling financial development, green energy, and R&D expenditures for shared prosperity

“…Healthcare policymakers and environmental specialists should observe the correlation between the stated factors and devise sustainable healthcare policies to control coronavirus cases in a country. Sueyoshi et al ( 2021 ) analyzed the response of COVID-19 on the clean energy system and healthcare insurance in a panel of 33 OECD countries. They found that healthcare insurance outweighs the negative healthcare concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to sustainable energy transition systems across countries.…”

Examining the Relationship between the Economic Performance of Technology-Based Small Suppliers and Socially Sustainable Procurement

“…To avoid an occurrence of zero in dual variable (i.e., multipliers), this study specifies the following three types of data ranges (R) according to the upper and lower bounds of production factors: Under variable returns to scale, we determine the level of efficiency (θ(k) v ) of the k th DMU as follows:θ(k) v = 1 − Obj(k), where Obj(k) is the optimized objective value of the k th DMU of Equation (A2). See [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76] for recent DEA developments.…”