Economie et statistiques N° 76/2014 A comparison of "green" productivity

In order to take into account the effects of production on the environment and, more generally, the urgency of finding a path of sustainable development many attempts have been made to set productivity growth measurements, including the negative impact of pollution. This paper presents programs that have been developed to extend the measurement of total factor productivity and its components; technical progress and technical efficiency, to the consideration of environmental performance minimizing infeasibility problems sometime encountered with usual approaches using simple Malmquist indices. This study shows that the choice of a sequential index has a significant impact on productivity measures and on the ranking of countries according of the enhanced performance. The approach is illustrated by a comparative exercise on 15 european countries using total factor productivity after taking negative externalities into account (CO2 emissions).