Measuring Total-Factor Carbon Efficiency In Developing Countries

This paper uses a total-factor framework to investigate carbon efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980-2005. Taking into account both the radial and non-radial adjustments, we propose efficiency measures which are calculated by data envelopment analysis (DEA) window. Assuming that any change of output levels will involve both desirable and undesirable outputs, this paper constructs the good performance based on desirable output and the bad performance based on undesirable output, and it measures countries'carbon efficiency by constructing an efficiency ratio of a good performance to a bad efficiency, at the same time, it finds that Peru (2.13), Paraguay (2.26), Sri Lanka (2.73), Guatemala (2.05) and Kenya (1.93) are the first five best and Venezuela (0.94), Iran (0.84), Syria (0.53) and China (0.94) are the last four worst. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between income per capita and total-factor carbon efficiency. The empirical results suggest that there is an N-shaped relationship with two turning points between carbon efficiency and income per capita.