Pollution and Health Effects: A Nonparametric Approach

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. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.