A Kuznets Curve in Environmental Efficiency: An Application on OECD Countries

The role of the environment is an important issue in policy making andthe accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. Inthis paper, using nonparametric techniques, an environmental efficiencyindex is developed for each of the OECD countries. These indexes allowone both to do cross section comparisons on the state of each country'sproduction process in its treatment of undesirable outputs and also totrace each country's modification of their production processesovertime. Furthermore in this study we investigate the factorsunderlying societies' environmental concerns that eventually lead tochanges in the environmental efficiency. The results provide furtherempirical evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000