The impact of China's financial expenditure on energy and carbon emission efficiency: Applying a meta-dynamic non-radial directional distance function

China is the world's largest energy consumer and carbon emitter, but despite unbalanced growth among the eastern, central, and western regions, local financial expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection has increased from 255.1 billion yuan in 2011 to 582.5 billion yuan in 2018. This research thus introduces financial expenditure like a new input into a dynamic meta-frontier non-radial directional distance function to evaluate China's energy and carbon emission efficiency over that period of time. Different from previous studies, after considering financial expenditure we find that most provinces have narrowed their gap with the benchmark frontier, reflecting that increasing financial expenditure does help improve energy and carbon emission efficiency. The results highlight that most provinces should increase their financial expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection, especially in the central and western regions, so as to narrow their technology gap with the eastern region.

Holistic Impact and Environmental Efficiency of Retrofitting Interventions on Buildings in the Mediterranean Area: A Directional Distance Function Approach

the study focuses on the application of a nonparametric methodology for evaluating the sustainability of retrofitting interventions to be applied on different typologies of buildings and different climate zones of the Mediterranean area. The paper starts from the analysis of data collected through the HAPPEN project, that is a H2020 European project which proposes a holistic approach for a deep and sustainable renovation of the Mediterranean residential Building stock. Even if the European Commission allocated considerable funds for retrofitting interventions, the choice of the optimal solution is not always that easy because several variables have to be considered. The present manuscript proposes a methodology to compare different retrofitting solutions combining Life-Cycle Cost (i.e., LCC) estimations with the nonparametric Directional Distance Function approach (i.e., DDF). In detail, the literature suggests that the DDF can be effectively used for comparing different observations through efficiency scores. The main result of the paper is the definition of a hybrid methodology that, starting from estimates of LCC and applying a DDF technique, represents a simple method for evaluating the best retrofitting intervention. Results are represented by two scores where the former represents a holistic efficiency measure, while the latter shows an environmental efficiency score.

Performance measurement using a novel directional distance function based super efficiency model and neighborhood theory

This paper entails a systematic approach for measuring the Super Efficiency Scores of a set of rival firms. This evaluation process is dependent on the location of the worst Decision-Making Unit retained by the technology set. Unlike antecedent researches, the worst point is selected from a predefined neighbourhood with an application of a linear model. Finally, the new Super Efficiency model measures the Efficiency score while embedding the worst point within the direction vector. This two-stage model is akin to the standard form of a Directional Distance Function and does not end up with problems of infeasibility, negative data or zero data. In other words, the method is found robust to classify the Decision Making Units into the Super-Efficient, Strongly Efficient, Weakly Efficient and Inefficient groups. Two cases once addressed by Seiford and Zhu (1997) and Byrnes et al. (1984) are illustrated here to explore the functionality of the model in comparison to a few renowned ones.