Countries environmental performance assessment

Abstract

Environmental performance assessments are often conducted using environmental indicators.Although these indicators provide a starting point for performance assessments, they do notprovide guidelines that countries should follow to improve performance. This paper developsan enhanced DEA model that provides a single summary measure of countries environmentalperformance, based on the aggregation of the indicators that underlie the estimation of theEnvironmental Performance Index (EPI). The main contribution of the methodology used inthis paper is to enable benchmarking, such that it becomes possible to identify the strengthsand weaknesses of each country, as well as the peers that inefficient countries should followto learn the best environmental practices.