Evaluation of Countries Environmental Efficiency Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Over the last few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in public attention to environmental issues. As a consequence of the growing concerns about environmental quality, climate change, and pollutant emission, which are key elements of sustainable development, one of the main challenges is measuring environmental efficiency. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the ecological efficiency of countries and rank countries based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) method, considering the favorable and unfavorable outputs (7 inputs and 7 outputs) affecting climate change in 2020 in 176 countries. The units were evaluated by CCR model and Also AP model in order to ranking both efficient units and inefficient units. The results show that the environmental efficiency of the selected countries is 80.60% on average, of which Iran ranks 140th with an efficiency of 0.58 and Iceland, Singapore and Lesotho have the highest environmental efficiency, respectively, as well as Sierra Leon, the Philippines, and Pakistan have the lowest environmental performance, respectively.