Benchmarking countries' environmental performance

Environmental performance assessments are often conducted using environmental indicators. Although these indicators provide a starting point for performance assessments, they do not provide guidelines that countries should follow to improve performance. This paper develops an enhanced Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model that provides a single summary measure of countries’ environmental performance, based on the aggregation of the indicators that underlie the estimation of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The DEA model used is based on a novel specification of weight restrictions. The main contribution of the methodology used in this paper is to enable benchmarking in such a way that it becomes possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each country, as well as the peers with similar features to the country under assessment. These peers provide examples of good environmental practices that countries with worse performance should follow to improve performance. Journal of the Operational Research Society advance online publication, 16 May 2012 doi:10.1057/jors.2012.62