Exploring the effect of countries’ economic prosperity on their biodiversity performance

This paper demonstrates an evaluation of 71 developed and under-developed countries’ biodiversity performance using a methodological framework based to the new advances of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). By using conditional DEA, bootstrapping and kernel density estimations, efficiency levels of 71 countries are compared and analyzed. In such a way the paper by modelling and measuring countries’ biodiversity performance analyses whether the countries environmental policies have been used efficiently in order to enhance biodiversity. Our empirical results indicate that there are major inefficiencies among the 71 countries in terms of their biodiversity performances which have been negatively influenced by their higher levels of population and of GDP per capita.