Oil Users, Air Polluters, and Forest Abusers: Macro-Level Segmentation of 121 Countries Based on Resource Usage Efficiency Per Capita

Abstract

This paper makes a vital contribution to the fields of sustainability studies and environmental policy making by presenting evidence that contradicts widely accepted conventional wisdom about the relative environmental efficiency of countries.

Significant findings include the existence of clusters of relative resource usage efficiency that are not entirely explained by geography, stages of economic development, or other conventional theories.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first time that a model-based three-dimensional cluster analysis has been used to address this question of ranking the relative environmental efficiency of countries.

Keywords: green business, green marketing, resource use, model-based cluster analysis, green business segmentation

JEL Classification: Q2