Environmental productivity in the European Union: A global Luenberger-metafrontier approach

This paper studies environmental productivity in the European Union-28 (EU-28) by extending the methodology proposed by Oh (2010) to an additive Luenberger-metafrontier framework. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows the analyst to account for cross-country heterogeneity. Using data on GDP, environmental pressures and inputs, the change in environmental productivity and its determinants between the years 2001 and 2016 is assessed in several scenarios; heterogeneity is accounted for by differentiating between the members of the former European Union-15 (EU-15) and the new members that joined the EU-28 from the 2000s onwards. Our results show an improvement in environmental p…