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Input-Orientated Data Envelopment Analysis Framework for Measuring and Decomposing Economic, Environmental and Ecological Efficiency: An Application to OECD Agriculture

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Abstract

This paper presents an input-orientated data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic, environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries. Economic, environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs, total amount of nutrients, and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively. The application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 OECD countries revealed that (i) there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systems more environmentally and ecologically sustainable; (ii) the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and, even more significantly, by changing the input combinations; (iii) the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across OECD countries within frontier-based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier-based measures and indicators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland University of Technology, Garden Point Campus, Brisbane, QLD, 4000, Australia

    Viet-Ngu Hoang

  2. The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Mohammad Alauddin

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  1. Viet-Ngu Hoang
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  2. Mohammad Alauddin
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Correspondence to Viet-Ngu Hoang.

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Hoang, VN., Alauddin, M. Input-Orientated Data Envelopment Analysis Framework for Measuring and Decomposing Economic, Environmental and Ecological Efficiency: An Application to OECD Agriculture. Environ Resource Econ 51, 431–452 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-011-9506-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-011-9506-6

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