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Existing studies of school efficiency primarily specify teacher inputs as the number of teachers and perhaps the student-teacher ratio. As a result, there is no direct qualitative recognition of the learning environment. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the learning environment directly into the assessment of school efficiency.

The authors employ data envelopment analysis to derive efficiency scores and the double-bootstrap truncated regression approach in Simar and Wilson’s (2007) Journal of Econometrics to quantify the sources of efficiency in 430 Queensland state primary schools. In the first stage, the outputs of student National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy scores and the inputs of full-time equivalent teaching staff and cumulative capital expenditure per student are used to measure efficiency. In the second stage, the authors specify an index of community socio-educational advantage, class size, the share of teachers with postgraduate qualifications, funds spent on professional development, and surveyed opinions from parents/caregivers, students, staff and principals on the learning environment to explain these measures of efficiency.

Socio-economic background and the teaching environment affect school efficiency. Although not all variables related to teacher contribution are significant, there is evidence to suggest that teachers have a positive influence on student performance hence school efficiency. Teachers ability to clearly explain the requirements of schoolwork tasks and listening to student opinions sets an ideal student engagement environment which can have a profound impact on student learning.

From a policy perspective, policy makers should target resources at inefficient schools aimed at enhancing student learning through teacher development and, at the same time, providing financial and non-financial educational assistance to students and their families from a low socio-educational background.

This is the first large-scale primary school efficiency analysis to incorporate the Simar and Wilson (2007) approach to explaining the determinants of efficiency, including teaching environment from the perspective of students, teachers and other stakeholders.

Recently, China has been paying increasing attention to how to improve the efficiency of the marine environment and realize a green and sustainable development of the marine economy. Consequently, the industrial structure is crucial to improving efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to introduce environmental factors into the efficiency analysis framework and explore the relationship between marine industrial structure and marine environmental efficiency.

This paper uses marine economic data under the DEA-BBC model to measure the marine environmental efficiency of provinces and cities and classifies them by cluster analysis. Then, the marine industrial structure and marine environmental efficiency are studied by an econometric model with human capital, ownership structure, land economic development level, scientific research input and government intervention degree as control variables.

The overall level of marine environmental efficiency is relatively low in China, increasing and then decreasing over the research period. The rationalization of industrial structure and scientific research input have significant promoting effects on marine environmental efficiency, while the degree of government intervention has a significant inhibiting effect. The positive effect of human capital on efficiency depends on whether it can be successfully converted into productivity. The effects of industrial structure advancement, ownership structure and land economic development level of on the marine environmental efficiency are mixed.

The results provide a theoretical and decision-making basis for China to transform and upgrade its marine industrial structure and sustainably develop the marine economy.

Physical environments, especially the sound environments of ILSs on a university campus, have become increasingly important in satisfying the diverse needs of students. Poor sound environments are widely acknowledged to lead to inefficient and underutilised spaces and to negatively influence students' learning outcomes. This study proposes two hypotheses to explore whether students' sound environment perceptions are related to their individual characteristics and whether students' preferences for the type of ILS are related to their sound environment sensitivities.

An investigation through a questionnaire survey has been conducted on both students' individual characteristics affecting their sound environment perceptions in informal learning spaces (ILSs) of a university campus and their sensitivities to the sound environments in ILSs affecting their preferences for the type of ILSs.

The research findings indicate that students' sound environment perceptions are associated with some of their individual characteristics. In addition, the results show that students' sound environment sensitivities affect their preferences for the type of ILS they occupy.

This study could help architects and managers of university learning spaces to provide better sound environments for students, thereby improving their learning outcomes. The article contributes valuable insights into the correlation between students' individual characteristics, sound environment perceptions and preferences for ILSs. The research findings add to the existing knowledge in this field and offer practical implications for enhancing design and management of university learning environments.

This paper aims to estimate the values of environmental efficiency of each province in China. Subsequently, it analyzes the changes of total factor productivity (TFP) before and after taking the environmental factors into account. Finally, the paper measures the effect of the components of environmental TFP on the convergence of economic growth.

The environmental control variables are taken as output variables and combined with a traditional data envelopment analysis model to build an environmental TFP Index. The growth of environmental TFP is compared among regions and the differences are analyzed. Furthermore, the decomposed components (advances in environmental technology and environmental technical efficiency) are used for regression analysis with labor productivity.

The environmental efficiency of most provinces in China has improved although some regions' efficiency remains low in Northeastern China. The value of environmental TFP is higher and more fluctuant during the period of 1997-2009 than that of traditional TFP. Technical efficiency has a convergence effect on economic growth of regions/provinces, but, after adding environmental factors, it turns into a divergence effect.

Because of data limitations, this paper does not consider the impacts of human capital and other factors on in the convergence analysis on economic. Neither does it consider the use of panel data to analyze the convergence of economic growth and validate the conclusions. These are potential further research directions.

The study confirms that improvements in environmental technologies play a dominant role in enhancing China's environmental TFP. Furthermore, it demonstrates that China's economic growth largely depends on technological progress. This finding, that China's economic growth depends on advances in environmental technology, implies that China should strive to improve its capacity for technological innovation.

The paper measures the value of environmental efficiency in the China's provinces and analyzes the relationship between pollution and economic development in each province. Panel data are used to compare the difference among environmental TFP, environmental factors and traditional TFP. The convergence of economic growth is analyzed in respect of environmental control variables.

The study aims to analyze the changes in banking market structure and their impact on the bank efficiency.

This study uses a one-stage stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to compare the impact of the market structure and the GFC on the economic efficiency of the major banks in both countries.

A significant negative impact of the GFC is observed on bank efficiency. Overall, Canadian banks posted better efficiency scores than their American counterparts. Additionally, cost-efficient banks are found to be more resilient to crises and more profit-efficient in the post-GFC period. The authors found that market power had a positive impact on the cost and profit efficiency of banks. Higher levels of equity, market power and concentration helped banks be more cost-efficient.

Only large banks are selected for study although it represents the majority stake of both banking sectors.

Banking regulators should include more measures to assess the banking market structure and performance.

As per the best knowledge of the authors, it is the first study to assess the change in banking market structure and efficiency of the US and Canadian banking sectors in the post-GFC period.

To explore the relationships among oil import dependence, energy (in)efficiency, and environmental damage for the USA. The goal is to illuminate possibilities for reducing oil import dependence.

The paper uses current information about costs of oil imports and energy alternatives for transportation vehicles, and environmental concerns, along with information about alternatives for energy provision for this purpose, to demonstrate feasible ways to reduce dependence, including government policy steps.

The USA is dependent on imported oil: two‐thirds of US oil used today is imported, and mostly used as gasoline for autos – close to 70 percent of all oil is used in transportation. This greatly affects the US BOP; oil imports cost almost US$300 billion in 2006. Current energy efficiency of auto engines is about 15 percent. Using hydrogen fuel cells would at least double this value, as well as reducing waste and completely eliminating carbon dioxide emissions. An efficient means of producing the hydrogen must be developed. A related problem is damage to the environment caused by greenhouse gas emissions. This problem also can be attacked by increasing engine efficiency, and ultimately by replacing gasoline in auto engines with alternative fuels such as hydrogen in fuel cells, as well as by reducing auto use, via mass transport. Policy alternatives include: encouraging energy efficiency via new technologies for vehicle engines; encouraging mass transportation; and higher production of fuels in the USA. Reducing demand via taxes, as in Europe, could reduce consumption, but at a cost to overall GDP unless alternative fuels become competitively priced.

The two main limitations on our recommendations are technology for making fuel cells more competitive, and willingness of government to take the needed policy steps. The practical implication is that dependence can be reduced with these steps.

The paper links the three corners of the energy triangle: dependence; efficiency, and environment.

This paper aims to investigate efficiency in the UK hotel industry and further evaluate the impacts of hotel characteristics and industry environment on efficiency.

The network data envelopment (DEA) weak link approach is used for the efficiency analysis, while the determinants of efficiency are evaluated by bootstrapped truncated regression.

The findings show that the UK hotel industry is very inefficient. The results of overall efficiency deconstruction show that the second-stage production process experiences an even lower level of efficiency than that of the first stage. The second-phase analysis shows that both the hotel-specific characteristics and the industry-specific characteristics are significantly related to UK hotel efficiency.

The robustness of the results is affected because a single set of input-intermediate product-outputs and a single DEA method were used. Therefore, further studies can use alternate inputs, intermediate measures and outputs in the efficiency analysis. In addition, the robustness of the efficiency score can be checked using alternate parametric or non-parametric methods.

Hotels in the UK should focus on cost reduction, business diversification, improvement in the capital level and labor productivity, while at industry and macroeconomic level, discounts are recommended to be provided to international tourism and the tourism industry should be further opened.

The weak-link approach has been applied to estimate the efficiency level, as this provides more robust and accurate results compared to other non-parametric methods in the existing empirical studies and unique hotel-specific and industry-specific determinants of efficiency are considered in the second-stage analysis.

Drawing on the systems theory and the natural resource-based view, the purpose of this paper is to advance an integrated resource efficiency view (IREV) and derive a composite “integrated resource efficiency index” (IRE-index) for assessing the environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies.

Using sub-national input-output data, the IRE-index builds on the human development index (HDI) and the OECD green growth indicators by including functions for environmental resource efficiency, energy, and material productivity. The study uses multiple regressions to examine and compare the IRE-index of 40 countries, including 34 OECD nations. The study further compares the IRE-index to similar composite indicators such as the human sustainable development index (HSDI) and the ecological footprint.

The IRE-index reveals a discrepancy between social development and resource efficiency in many of the world’s wealthiest production economies. Findings also show that material productivity has been the key driver for observed improvements in IRE over time. The index is a robust macro-level methodology for assessing resource efficiency and sustainability, with implications for production operations in global supply chains.

The IREV and IRE-index both contribute towards advancing green supply chain management and sustainability, and country-level resource efficiency accounting and reporting. The IRE-index is a useful composite for capturing aggregate environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies. The paper clearly outlines the managerial, academic, and policy implications of the IREV and resulting index.

Energy, as the most valuable concept of today, works with all disciplines, gains momentum, and increases all kinds of studies on energy and consciousness on the subject. The media provides the most rapid and effective awareness of energy, the requirements for efficient energy use, energy literacy, conscious use, and sustainability. At this stage, content related to all types of topics produced in the digital world gains importance. As communication is carried out with different target groups, public service announcements constitute an important place among the public affairs activities. Public relations can be defined as communication management. In this communication management style, strategic plans are made, and attitudes and behavior changes can be obtained through the target groups. It is aimed at delivering the content produced through mass media in public service announcements to individuals. The public is educated and made aware of the issues that are of concern to them. With these short announcements, information is provided on health, education, etc., and awareness is created for these issues. Public interests are taken as the basis for messages that do not have a commercial aspect and do not cover a very long time. In the study, the importance of public service announcements on energy efficiency is evaluated, and within the scope of the research, semiotic analysis will be made of the contents of the YouTube page of the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. At this point, the issues and indicators emphasized in public service announcements on energy will be analyzed.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of the regional business environment on local firm innovation, considering various dimensions such as administrative, financial and legal environments.

Multiple regression analysis is employed to analyze archival data for firms listed on Chinese stock markets.

We find that the optimizations of the administrative and financial environments positively affect firm innovation, whereas the legal environment does not exert a similar impact. Our analysis also reveals that the business environment’s optimization significantly influences innovation in firms that are small, non-state-owned and operating in high-tech industries. Furthermore, the business environment acts as a moderating variable in the relationship between firm innovation and firm value.

This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of institutional-level determinants of firm innovation, highlighting the nuances of the legal environment and the importance of context-specific analysis, especially in emerging markets like China.

Developing countries can significantly enhance firm innovation by improving the business environment, including the optimization of administrative and financial systems, reducing transaction costs and ensuring capital supply. Tailored legal frameworks and alternative institutional strategies may also be explored.

This study explicitly emphasizes the governmental role in promoting firm innovation, shedding light on policy formulation and strategic alignment with local administrative policies.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to explore the relationship between the business environment and firm innovation using World Bank indicators in an emerging market context, providing novel insights into the unique dynamics of legal, financial and administrative sub-environments.