Abstract
The widespread of sustainable development concept intimates a vision of an ecologically balanced society, where it is necessary to preserve environmental resources and integrate economics and environment in decision-making. Consequently, there has been increasing recognition in developed nations of the importance of good environmental performance, in terms of reducing environmental disamenities, generated as outputs of the production processes, and increasing environmental benefits. In this context, the aim of the present work is to evaluate the environmental efficiency of Italian provinces by using the non-parametric approach to efficiency measurement, represented by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique. To this purpose, we propose a two-step methodology allowing for improving the discriminatory power of DEA in the presence of heterogeneity of the sample. In the first phase, provinces are classified into groups of similar characteristics. Then, efficiency measures are computed for each cluster.
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Notes
- 1.
In order to individuate a significant number of efficient organisations, the literature suggests that the number of units has to be greater than 3(m+s), where m+s is the sum of the number of inputs and number of outputs (Dyson et al. 2001).
- 2.
k-means clustering requires the number of resulting cluster, k, to be specified prior to analysis. Thus, it will produce k different clusters of greatest possible distinction.
- 3.
Current scientific evidence links short-term NO2 exposures, ranging from 30 min to 24 h, with adverse respiratory effects including airway inflammation in healthy people and increased respiratory symptoms in people with asthma. Nitrogen dioxide also plays a major role in the atmospheric reactions that produce ground-level ozone or smog (Coli et al. 2011).
- 4.
Suspended particulate matter (SPM) is a mixture of particles of different size and state (solid and liquid) ranging from 0.01 μm to >10 μm in diameter: particles measuring <10 μm (PM10) penetrate into the lower respiratory system and might penetrate into the bloodstream. Particles may contain metals, such as zinc and nickel, organic materials and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic (Coli et al. 2011).
- 5.
We have also tried to fix a larger number of clusters, but we have obtained clusters with a few units, and in this case DEA method cannot be applied with good results.
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Nissi, E., Rapposelli, A. (2013). Performance Measurement of Italian Provinces in the Presence of Environmental Goals. In: Giudici, P., Ingrassia, S., Vichi, M. (eds) Statistical Models for Data Analysis. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00032-9_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00032-9_29
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