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Pollution and Health Effects: A Nonparametric Approach

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Abstract

Pollution is associated with serious environmental and health problems. For instance particulate matter (PM2.5) causes severe health problems like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and outdoor exposure may be carcinogenic to humans. In this study data envelopment analysis is used to estimate the efficiencies of 18 European countries for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2016. Directional distance function is utilized to deal with undesirable outputs. Two models are specified one with labour and capital as inputs and GDP/c and mortality from exposure to PM2.5 as desirable and undesirable outputs respectively and the other with environmental related tax revenues as additional input. The results derived are bias corrected to obtain the accurate efficiency scores of every country considered. On the whole the most efficient countries are revealed to be Sweden, Finland, France, the Netherlands and the UK. The inclusion of environmentally related tax revenues seems to have a little influence in efficiency scores.

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Notes

  1. Recent studies by Xu and Tan (2019) and Liu et al. (2019) explore similar issues in a mathematical framework. Specifically, Xu and Tan (2019) examine the transboundary pollution and the effects to the environment and human health focusing on a differential game model of transboundary pollution between two asymmetric regions. On the other hand Liu et al. (2019) use the Hamilton function method to investigate dynamic relationships among fiscal decentralization, growth and environmental degradation as pollution with decoupling under endogenous growth theory.

  2. https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/environment/air/Pages/default.aspx.

  3. The sources of the data used were the following:

  4. The data are available on request. At this point it would be important to be noted as for the environmentally related tax revenue that there were no prices for France for the last year and Greece for the last 2 years. For this purpose the prices of the previous years have been used.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor Professor Hans Amman and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on an earlier version of our paper. Any remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility.

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  1. Laboratory of Operations Research, Department of Economics, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

    George Halkos & Georgia Argyropoulou

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Halkos, G., Argyropoulou, G. Pollution and Health Effects: A Nonparametric Approach. Comput Econ 58, 691–714 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-019-09963-2

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