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Waste management is one of the vital objectives for the EU since it has a substantial effect on the environment. European Commission expects annual waste creation on Earth to increase by 70% by 2050. European Commission also estimates that efficient waste management might boost the EU economy's gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.5% by 2030. Hence, it is essential to conduct research including both efficiency and influencing factors analysis for effective waste management. First, we employ both slack-based measure (SBM) and super-SBM data envelopment analysis approaches to investigate the waste management efficiency of the EU region and distinguish between efficient countries. The countries with small areas such as Luxembourg and Ireland have demonstrated super efficiency. Second, we maintain our empirical research with ordinary least square analysis to explore the determinants of waste management. We also conclude that population density, GDP per capita, and tourism rise the amount of waste generated in the EU region.

This chapter provides a survey of alternative methodologies for measuring and comparing productivity and efficiency of airlines, and reviews representative empirical studies. The survey shows the apparent shift from index procedures and traditional OLS estimation of production and cost functions to stochastic frontier methods and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods over the past three decades. Most of the airline productivity and efficiency studies over the last decade adopt some variant of DEA methods. Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly interested in the effects of deregulation and liberalization on airline productivity and efficiency as well as the effects of ownership and governance structure. Since the 2000s, however, studies tend to focus on how business models and management strategies affect the performance of airlines. Environmental efficiency now becomes an important area of airline productivity and efficiency studies, focusing on CO₂ emission as a negative or undesirable output. Despite the fact that quality of service is an important aspect of airline business, limited attempts have been made to incorporate quality of service in productivity and efficiency analysis.

In recent years, the airline industry has been growing and transforming rapidly in the Asia-Pacific area. This study analyzes and benchmarks the comparative operational efficiencies of the major Asian air carriers. Data envelopment analysis model and disaggregate output efficiency measures are used to evaluate the operational efficiencies of 31 Asian airlines from 2015 to 2019. The findings suggest that nonflag carriers, low-cost carriers, and high-income regions' carriers have significantly higher levels of efficiency than flag carriers, full-service carriers, and low-income regions' carriers in overall, revenue, and passenger traffic efficiencies. The efficiencies between alliance carriers and nonalliance carriers along with those of ASEAN and non-ASEAN carriers are not significantly different.

This chapter empirically investigates the main drivers of the circular economy (CE) and sustainable development (SD) of European countries. The European Union (EU) legislation imposes equal rules for the members who should be followed to achieve CE and SD. This chapter gives a critical overview of the related literature on this topic. The second part focuses on measuring the efficiency of EU countries in achieving CE and SD via a nonparametric approach. Furthermore, the results from the efficiency evaluation are used as a dependent variable in determining which economic, social, institutional, and other factors have the greatest influence on CE and SD achievements. The nonparametric approach consists of selected models of data envelopment analysis (DEA), as this is a methodology useful in constructing a ranking system based on selected criteria. The results indicate that on average, the most efficient countries were (besides Malta and Luxembourg) the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom. The worst performing ones were Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Croatia. The second part of the research indicates that the resource production and corruption perception index has the greatest effect on the efficiency scores, followed by education attainment. The research and development (R&D) variable is not significant in the observed sample. Based on these results, specific policy recommendations are given at the end of this chapter.