A kuznets curve in environmental efficiency: An application on OECD countries

The role of the environment is an important issue in policy making and the accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. In this paper , using nonparametric techniques, an environmental efficiency index is deve loped for each of the OECD countries. These indexes allow one both to do cr oss section comparisons on the state of each country's production process i n its treatment of undesirable outputs and also to trace each country's mod ification of their production processes overtime. Furthermore in this study we investigate the factors underlying societies' environmental concerns th at eventually lead to changes in the environmental efficiency. The results provide further empirical evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve hypo thesis.