Improving energy efficiency and productivity is one of the most cost-effective ways for achieving the sustainable development target in China. This paper employs non-radial directional distance function approach to empirically investigate energy efficiency and energy productivity by including...

This paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 30 provinces in China during the period of 1997–2011 using a meta-frontier framework with the improved directional distance function (DDF). We construct a new environmental production possibility set...

This paper examines the optimal control of CO2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis. Several centralized data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of CO2 emissions under spatial, temporal and spatial–temporal allocation strategies,...

The theories of ecological modernization and urban environmental transition both recognize that urbanization can have positive and negative impacts on the natural environment with the net effect being hard to determine a priori. This study uses recently developed panel regression techniques that...

In this paper we model the long-run relationship between per capita CO2 and per capita income for the Spanish economy over the period 1857–2007. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (ECK) the relationship between the two variables has an inverted-U shape. However, previous studies for...

We study the impact of competition and environmental policy (feed-in tariff vs. the EU ETS) on investment, CO2 emissions and welfare in an electricity sector. We consider different market structures (a planner who maximises social welfare vs. duopoly) and two types of consumers (those whose...

Using a long span of data in Spain, Esteve and Tamarit (2012b) reported evidence of a strong link between per capita income and per capita CO2. In this paper we extend their work, finding evidence of both non-linear cointegration and asymmetric adjustment using a novel approach due to Sephton...

The process of urbanization has been shown to be important for economic development, environmental impacts and human wellbeing, particularly in developing countries. In this paper we compare structure, data sources and scenario results of four integrated assessment models that are capable of...

We present an alternative decomposition technique to identify the factors which contribute to the change of aggregate CO2 emissions by using distance functions to model the joint production of desirable and undesirable outputs. The key feature of the proposed approach is the introduction of...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of Kyoto Protocol, designed for the industrialized countries to earn emission credits by investing in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction projects in developing countries, shall contribute to emission reductions and sustainable development in the host...