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The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate energy use and performance, as well as existing energy efficiency policy and measures in the Latvian industrial sector, in order to highlight possible scenarios for energy efficiency improvements in the future.

The paper takes the form of a literature review and data analysis.

It is concluded that the existing energy efficiency measures for the industrial sector in Latvia do not work effectively. Also, it is expected that the planned measures for energy efficiency improvements for the industrial sector will not reach the defined energy saving targets in the framework of the Latvian NEEAP. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a common strategy on energy efficiency in the industrial sector in Latvia. This should be accomplished by reviewing the existing literature and data, as well as drawing up new, well‐designed energy efficiency measures.

The results of this study can be applied and used in the development of energy efficiency policy for the industrial sector in Latvia. The paper also points out the main weak points of existing policy measures that can be improved in order to meet the energy saving target for the Latvian industrial sector.

In this paper, the Latvian industrial sector's energy efficiency policy and related measures have been organized and evaluated for the first time. Also, the importance of energy efficiency improvements in the industrial sector has been highlighted. This is evident from the fact that, currently, almost no energy efficiency measure for the industrial sector in Latvia works sufficiently.

The aim of this paper is to show current position of domestic airports and provide an improvement scheme through the comparative analysis of efficiency and social efficiency. We used SBM (Slack Based Measure) for efficiency and undesirable output model that is extended from SBM for social efficiency. In addition, window analysis is used for analyzing the trend of the values. For the scope of this study, we analyzed fourteen airports in Korea from 2004 to 2009. In the models, we considered the length of runway, the number of employees and terminal area as input factors, and the number of passengers, the amount of cargo and the number of flights as desirable outputs and directly controllable CO2 emissions from airports as undesirable output. The results show that all of the efficiencies are higher than the social efficiencies and both of them are decreasing by years. To improve social efficiency in 2009, the average amounts of reduced CO2 emissions which account for 48.3% of the total emissions are required.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first and the most important is to examine the efficiency of Islamic banks relative to conventional banks operating in North African Arab countries, in terms of cost and revenue efficiency. The second objective is to assess more evidence regarding the banking system efficiency trend and dynamics in each single country, and to compare such trends among countries included in the study.

The non‐parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to estimate cost and revenue efficiency scores assuming variable returns to scale (VRS). The sample consists of nine Islamic banks and 11 conventional banks.

The results indicated that Islamic banks achieved higher average revenue efficiency scores over conventional banks in this region, while the growth rate of revenue efficiency score of Islamic bank was less than conventional banks. In terms of cost efficiency, the results varied from country to another. The results also showed that both groups of banks were close to each other, with an advantage to conventional banks, which suffer less cost efficiency loss over time compared to Islamic banks.

The very limited data sources (banks' web sites) was was the main limitation faced during preparing for this research. Another limitation was the non‐regularity of annual reports.

Islamic banks are highly challenged in finding investment opportunities/avenues that comply with Islamic regulations, unlike conventional banks that can invest in fixed income securities. There is a serious need for some countries to deregulate their banking systems more, in order to enhance the compatibility and the efficiency of their banking, such as the case of Sudan.

Given the previously mentioned difficulties, decent data set were collected. The value of this paper is the use of nonparametric DEA to analyse cost and revenue efficiences in the countries of this region.

This paper proposes a scheme to estimate the technical efficiency at child care centers for the less‐than‐three‐year‐old infants by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and to manage the quality of care service through implementing flexible and efficient government subsidy system. The result of technical efficiency estimation shows that there exists the heterogeneity in technical efficiency a substantial opportunity for improvement in technical efficiency across child care centers. This result implies that government may bring up the competition by giving subsidy differentially based on efficiency and use the money which has been used inefficiently other purposes. Both can improve the quality of child care service.

The purpose of this paper is to get hold of the main influence factors of the investment efficiency of environmental governance and control them to improve its efficiency sensitively and employ full use of the investment of environmental governance.

The assessment index system of the investment efficiency of environmental governance is built. Its investment efficiency is assessed based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). The influence degree on the efficiency between each assessment index is calculated by the grey incidence degree analysis method to find the key influence factors. The efficiency of the investment in the environmental governance can be improved by managing and controlling the key factors.

The results prove that it is available by the data of 14 cities in Shandong Province in 2008. The key influence factors of the investment efficiency of the environmental governance are: total investment in the treatment of environmental pollution (F₁); industrial soot removal (F₃); industrial wastewater meeting discharge standards (F₂); and the volume of garbage disposal (F₉).

The method exposed in the paper can be used to solve investment efficiency problem of the environmental governance of the other provinces, or other years and even other countries.

The paper succeeds in solving investment efficiency problem of the environmental governance by DEA and grey incidence degree analysis method.

There is a great interest from the European Union in measuring the efficiency of energy use in households, and this is an area where EDP has done research in both data collection and methodology. This paper reports on a survey of electric energy use in Portuguese households, and reviews and extends the analysis of how efficiently households use electrical energy. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate household electrical energy efficiency in different regions using econometric analysis of the survey data. In addition, the same methodology was applied to a time-series data set, to evaluate recent developments in energy efficiency.

The paper describes the application to Portuguese households of a new approach to evaluate energy efficiency, developed by Filippini and Hunt (2011, 2012) in which an econometric energy demand model was estimated to control for exogenous variables determining energy demand. The variation in energy efficiency over time and space could then be estimated by applying econometric efficiency analysis to determine the variation in energy efficiency.

The results obtained allowed the identification of priority regions and consumer bands to reduce inefficiency in electricity consumption. The time-series data set shows that the expected electricity savings from the efficiency measures recently introduced by official authorities were fully realized.

This approach gives some guidance on how to introduce electricity saving measures in a more cost effective way.

This paper outlines a new procedure for developing useful tools for modelling energy efficiency.

Crane plays a very important role in national economy with greatly reduced labor intensity, improved production efficiency and promoted social development as an indispensable auxiliary tool and process equipment. Therefore, its energy consumption becomes an unavoidable topic and in fact, energy consumption of crane is very huge. It has been proved to be the most cost-effective way for reducing energy consumption to establish and implement new energy efficiency standard. Thus, it is necessary to analyze and evaluate the energy efficiency for overhead crane so as to propose a new energy efficiency standard. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, four kinds of energy consumption sources of overhead crane is considered, based on which, an energy efficiency grading model for overhead crane based on BP neural network is proposed. Second, DS evidential theory is analyzed and based on it, an energy efficiency evaluation model based on BP neural network and DS evidential theory is proposed. The evaluation procedure is discussed in detail. Then, a case is demonstrated how the evaluation is carried out.

If overhead cranes with different energy consumptions need to be graded according to energy efficiency, the criterions to establish the energy efficiency labels for overhead cranes is proposed in this paper.

The research results can provide energy efficiency standard proposal of overhead crane for relative departments to monitor the design, manufacturing and use of overhead crane.

An energy efficiency grading model for overhead crane based on BP neural network is proposed. An energy efficiency evaluation model based on BP neural network and DS evidential theory is proposed.

Outlines the deregulation of banking in Greece and previous research on measuring banking efficiency. Uses 1993‐1998 data to assess the effects of deregulation on both private and state‐controlled banks. Shows that the state banks were less efficient than the private and that the gap widened during the period for both non‐interest and labour expenses as a proportion of operating income, as the private banks increased their efficiency. Finds the relative efficiency measured by data envelopment analysis supports the greater efficiency of private banks although the difference is only significant at the 5 per cent level for 1996. Compares the four most efficient banks and briefly considers the underlying reasons for the findings.

This paper aims to develop and utilize a conceptual framework to examine the impact of liquidity and solvency on cost efficiency for a sample of Kansas farms.

A standard cost-efficiency model is modified to incorporate liquidity and solvency ratios. Tobit regressions are used to determine the impact of farm characteristics on improvements in efficiency.

Results confirm that liquidity and solvency measures have a significant impact on improving cost efficiency. Farms with larger expenditures on purchased inputs relative to capital were less likely to improve efficiency when liquidity and solvency were considered.

To the authors' knowledge, the paper is the first to add liquidity and solvency ratios to the cost-efficiency model developed by Färe et al. for the analysis of farms.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a scheme to estimate the technical efficiency of trucks engaged in logistics and to analyze the properties of efficiency. The objectives are to determine individual‐truck level technical efficiency using both radial and non‐radial measures for freight trucks, to calculate the degree of input overuse.

Data envelopment analysis is employed in this paper because it does not require the assumption of the functional specification between input and output factors and also includes multiple outputs unlike stochastic frontier model. Data for empirical analysis in this paper come from a survey of truck drivers.

The result of technical efficiency estimation shows that there exists a substantial opportunity for improvement in technical efficiency of trucks engaged in logistics and also the heterogeneity in the technical efficiency among trucks based on their capacity and age. For scale efficiency, it is also possible to confirm the existence of improvement opportunity and heterogeneity among truck and that trucks with large capacity are more scale‐efficient than those with small capacity.

The paper analyzes the properties of technical efficiency scores of trucks engaged in logistics and finds some managerial insights which can help them improve their efficiency.