Measuring environmental performance under different environmental DEA technologies

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) efficiency measures integrated with the environmental DEA technology have gained popularity in environmental performance measurement. Most studies assume that the environmental DEA technology exhibits constant returns to scale (CRS). In this paper we further discuss the environmental DEA technologies that exhibit non-increasing returns to scale (NIRS) and variant returns to scale (VRS). The pure measures under different situations and a mixed measure under the VRS environmental DEA technology for measuring environmental performance are proposed. For the measures that deal with nonlinear programming models, we also give their linear programming equivalents. Finally a study on measuring the carbon emission performance of eight world regions is presented. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.