Abstract
This study examined the impact of the financial crisis on the environmental and technical efficiencies of the Japanese manufacturing industry. Overall, we found that while the crisis had a negative impact on technical efficiency, it did not affect environmental efficiency—the only exception was the transportation equipment sector which improved its environmental efficiency following the crisis. Additionally, we found that capital intensity does not necessarily affect environmental efficiency. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide directions for future research.
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Notes
Dumontaux and Pop (2013), p. 269 indicated that “according to the bankruptcy petition #08-13555, filed on Monday, September 15th, 2008, Lehman's total assets of $639 billion made it the largest failure in US history, about six times bigger than the largest previous failure.”
According to Price et al. (2011), p. 2172, in 2007, “China’s State Council announced a Comprehensive Working Plan for Energy Conservation and Emission Reduction to accelerate the closing of small plants and those with outdated capacity in 14 high energy-consumption industries: electric power, iron-making, steel-making, electrolytic aluminum, ferroalloy, calcium carbide, coking, cement, coal, plate glass, pulp and paper, alcohol, monosodium glutamate, and citric acid. The policy estimates that the closures will save 118 Mtce (3.46 EJ).”
Note that one cannot use normal regression here as the measures of TE and EE estimated in 1st stage are censored between zero and one.
Because the collapse of Lehman Brothers occurred in September 2008, the financial crisis affected both 2008 and 2009 (Coulibaly et al. 2013). To check the robustness of our estimation, we apply another financial crisis dummy (called Crisis’) defined by Crisis’ = 1 if year = 2009 and Crisis’ = 0 if year is not 2009. Overall, we found high consistency in the results. More details can be obtained from the authors upon request.
This is obtained from the Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Reporting System of the Ministry of the Environment.
Deflators for the Japanese firms come from the Statistics Bureau and the Bank of Japan database.
Detailed information about JSIC is described in the HP of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. (http://www.soumu.go.jp/english/dgpp_ss/seido/sangyo/index.htm).
Price index is available on the following home page. http://www.imf.org/external/np/res/commod/Table1a.pdf.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (26000001) by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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Fujii, H., Assaf, A.G., Managi, S. et al. Did the financial crisis affect environmental efficiency? evidence from the Japanese manufacturing sector. Environ Econ Policy Stud 18, 159–168 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-015-0127-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-015-0127-0