How European Union Regions are Doing in Sustainable Municipal Waste Management? An Analysisof the Performance and Convergence of European Union Regions
38 Pages Posted: 20 May 2023
Abstract
Sustainable Waste Management is key to achieving a circular economy. Monitoring the transformation path that the European Union-Member States are undertaking is, in fact, critical to assessing the impact and effectiveness of recent European waste legislation. Despite several studies have demonstrated positive performance and convergence in the treatment of waste, efficiency evaluation analysis at the regional level is still scant. This research attempts to benchmark the municipal solid waste management performance of 167 NUTS-2 regions in 20 European member states between 2008-2013 and assess whether is there any positive convergence between regions. The efficiency assessment is done with four different models of Data Envelopment Analysis - Benefit-of-Doubt, a non-parametric approach which constitutes a special case of the Data Envelopment Analysis model. Our results reveal that despite a progressive convergence, still, substantial differences in municipal solid waste management performances exist between EU-20 regions, even within the same country. Particularly, the analysis demonstrates that the best performers are registered in Central and Northern EU NUTS-2 regions, whileEastern and Southern EU NUTS-2 regions performed generally worse.
Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis, Municipal Waste Management, Composite Indicators, NUTS2 Regional classification, Circular Economy
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