The new model of agricultural policy in Europe, applied through the rural development programs (RDPs), has been considered most appropriate for the case of Greece, given the structural problems of this country?s farm sector (including the high proportion of mountainous, less favoured areas in...

This paper provides an investigation of the effectiveness of the main measures applied in Rural Development Programs, in particular those for farm structure intervention, at regional/national level on the basis of cluster analysis with spatial econometric tools. The main results are: (i) the...

Good governance approaches in policy formulation and implementation - based on key concepts like participation, networking, transparency and accountability - are more and more adopted by the EU in addressing its rural policies reforms. Public Administrations at all levels should be evaluated...

Using the directional distance function we study a cross section of 110 countries to examine the efficiency of management of the tradeoffs between pollution and income. The DEA model is reformulated to permit 'reverse disposability' of the bad output. Further, we interpret the optimal solution...

This paper addresses the question how team production promotes efficiency of a firm when some inputs can be rewarded on the basis of outputs but some cannot because they are shared among outputs and non-separable. A multi-activity DEA model with variable returns to scale is proposed to provide...

Economic activity produces not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs that are usually called negative externalities in economic theory. Negative externalities are usually omitted from efficiency assessments (i.e., applications of Data Envelopment Analysis) which fail to express the...

This paper applies a data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to assess technical efficiency of both private and public universities in Italy. Moving from the traditional context where inputs and outputs are assumed to be non-negative, a directional distance function approach has been applied in...

The directional distance function model is a generalization of the radial model in data envelopment analysis (DEA). The directional distance function model is appropriate for dealing with cases where undesirable outputs exist. However, it is not a units-invariant measure of efficiency, which...

This paper, by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by Simar and Vanhems [J. Econometrics 166 (2012) 342-354] modifies the model by Färe and Grosskopf [Eur. J. Operat. Res. 157 (2004) 242-245], examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic...